Archive for the ‘Unconferences’ Category

Michelle Boule talks about her new book Mob Rule Learning: Camps, Unconferences, and Trashing the Talking Head with Wired Campus in Q & A: a Onetime Librarian Talks About the ‘Unconference’ Movement.

“I was at a point in my career where I learned that red tape and bureaucracy aren’t always what get things done. So I got involved in the more subversive side of my profession—attending unconference-type events and finding different learning opportunities for librarians. These opportunities weren’t created by professional organizations but were created by librarians for other librarians to help us on the front lines. After attending and planning a couple of unconferences, I realized there wasn’t much information out there about them, especially in paper format.”

Congrats Michelle!!

Steven J. Bell, Associate University Librarian at Temple University writes about virtual conferences for Library Journal in A Conference Wherever You Are. This excellent article compares the advantages and disadvantages of virtual vs. face-to-face conferences, a timely discussion in this time of dwindling library budgets.

“Are there librarians who are ready to give up completely on F2F conferencing? Will virtual conferences, in time, replace physical ones altogether? I spoke to several librarians about their virtual conference experience, and while none of them is completely sold on virtual conferences, all see their benefits. There is near universal agreement that virtual conferences are great for the learning opportunities they offer at tremendous value. With lower registration fees and elimination of travel and lodging, the cost and time savings of virtual conferences are their greatest advantages. But nearly all I spoke to see room for improvement, and the one improvement they’d like to see may be one that virtual conferences may never deliver: personal contacts through networking.”

Dawn Foster at GigaOm writes about Community Building and Real-World Events. This quick article offers some excellent suggestions for establishing a sense of community at events aimed at both organizers and participants. The recommendations are sorted into Evening Activities, Play Games, and Shared Spaces and Hacker Lounges categories, here are just a few:

• Resist the urge to sit with people you already know well, or sit with one friend and invite a few people that you don’t know very well to join your table.
• Have food and drinks (free if possible). This encourages people to actually attend rather than skipping out to have dinner in small groups.
• Organize group transportation. This removes one more barrier to attend and encourages people to continue talking to people during the trip. I’ve seen this work as a group walking a few blocks to the event, or in waves of buses.

I’m very excited to tell everyone that I’ll be writing a regular column for Library Journal’s Academic Newswire, and that my first column was published today! My column is called Stacking the Tech and it will be covering technology topics as they pertain to academic libraries in particular. My first article for the column is Unconference Uncovers Latest Tech Trends which covers the recent LibCampNYC 2009 event.