librarian.net

I gave a talk this afternoon for a one day workshop given by the Michigan Library Consortium about teaching technology in libraries. It was a keynote-ish talk so more “big picture” talking and less “this is how we do it.”

To that end, I did a new-from-the-ground-up talk about technology instruction and even wrote out notes for all of my slides so people who weren’t there could maybe follow along later. As anyone who has seen me speak knows, I tend to extemporanize (sp?) quite a bit so while the bones of the talk are in the notes, I also told a lot of stories about the libraries I work in and waved my hands around a lot. You can see the notes and a mov or pdf of the slides here: Teaching Tech in Libraries: what are we doing?

I’m still trying to find a good way to put slideware talks online without having to re-give the talk and toss it into Slideshare. Big thanks to all the folks from Michigan for being such a great audience and Twitterfolks for giving me some good advice. (go be Flickr friends with Kevin to see more (admittedly, not that fascinating) photos of this event)

Hi. I gave a talk today about blogs at the Michigan Library Consortium’s special Program The Library Rebooted. You’d think there wasn’t much left to be said about blogs, but I found a way. It was an interesting day since I was also presenting with Meredith who talked about wikis, Aaron who talked about IM and Darlene who talked about social software. Big fun day and the tippy tail end of my long US tour. I’m going to dinner with librarians tonight, flying out tomorrow, staying with my sister and then taking the long peaceful bus back up to Vermont on Friday. Fifteen days, six beds, five talks, six cities, ten plane rides and one bag + laptop. Except for the lousy “we sort of misplaced your luggage” interlude last night, it’s been a really nice time.

My short talk Blah Blah Blogs: Why They Matter for You and Your Library is online in the normal place. update: Kathy, the well-rounded librarian has blogged my talk.

I’ll be doing a lot of work-related travelling over the next few weeks. I encourage anyone who will be at any of these conferences to stop by and say hello.

• Wisconsin Library Association - I’ll be doing a digital divide talk and a tech tips talk this Friday. Possibly the best conference ever, according to one blog. It’s at a weird resort-like place. I will be met at the airport by someone in a safari get-up.
• Hawaii Library Association - Hawaii is the only US state I’ve never been to. The second to last one on my list, Alaska, I crossed off in 1997 sometime. I’ll be discussing high tech on a shoestring, and tech support tips for reference librarians on the 11th of November.
• Michigan Library Consortium - a workshop with Aaron Schmidt and Meredith Farkas about blogs, wikis and IM. I’ll be doing the blogs part on the 15th.

Yeah, it’s a lot of travelling. I even got a new haircut. After this I’m settling down and hunkering down for the winter and focusing on writing and planning for 2007.