virtual conferencing and a few more talks

I was at an NHLA business meeting talking to people about why they might care about what I had for breakfast. It’s a flip way of talking about the whole “Who cares about Twitter/Facebook/Social?” stuff that I feel I hear softly filtering down from offline populations who mostly know about this sort of technology through print media and TV. So, given an opportunity to talk about what I do all day, I explained how social media permeates and penetrates the things I do.

My employer, MetaFilter, has a strong social component as well as claiming over 200 librarians among its members. While the site itself is fairly restricted to bloggish interaction, we have some super-organized members who like to compile Best Of sorts of lists over on our wiki. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but the Read Me page on the wiki now has links to over 1000 threads worth of book recommendations.

Last week I was down at Simmons where I gave a really short talk about … talking. Basically talking about what public speaking entails and offers in the larger world of librarianship. It’s called “You Do What For A Job?” and you might like it.

So, since I was sticking around town working this month I didn’t go to Internet Librarian or most of NELA, and a few smaller conferences. It was fun to read other people’s summaries, and occasionally real-time reactions, for all the presentations. I’ll be making a sort of “what I learned from not going to conferences” post sometime in the next few days. For now, I’m done with public speaking until March and I’m pretty okay with that. It’s been a fun Fall season.

4 thoughts on “virtual conferencing and a few more talks

  1. Virtual conferencing allows you to hold a virtual meeting. That is, you are in one location and students are in another.There are two methods by which you can have a virtual conference. You can have a web or video conference. With a web conference the facilitator and participants are at their respective desktops and the conference is held online using the internet. For video conferencing the facilitator and participants need to be in specific locations where video-conferencing equipment is set up. Here a dedicated network, rather than the internet, is used and this can provide a more reliable or robust service.

  2. Thanks for sharing “Why you care what I had for breakfast”.

    Indeed, the growing digital divide keeps me up at night, as well…especially as more potential employers (Walmart, Home Depot, other big box types of stores) require online job applications. It is heartbreaking to see people who’ve never used a computer before have to learn mouse skills, type accurately AND complete a really long application in one session at the library.

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