Toon (Lib)TeachMeet – May the Fourth be with you!
On May 4th I attended the first ever Toon (Lib) TeachMeet. I had seen a lot of discussion about this concept on Twitter, following the success of the very first Cam (Lib)TeachMeet in Cambridge, and I was really interested in going along to see how an ‘unconference’ works in practice. The flexible, unstructured style of the event, along with the small number of attendees, meant there was a fairly informal atmosphere, which allowed for easy networking; something which can seem quite daunting at a larger, more formal conference. The short presentations (at either 2 or 7 mins long) meant that the presenters really had to focus on getting the key points across, conveying their ideas concisely. I really liked this as we were given the most important snippets of information, going away some new ideas, but without your head too full of information.
Although I’m not currently working in a teaching role, this is an area that I’m really keen to get into in the future so I was mainly hoping to use this experience to gather some ideas and knowledge to take forward in my career, whilst also discovering some approaches to use in ad hoc information literacy training when dealing with enquiries at the library help desk.
It was also a great opportunity to meet other information professionals working in my region and to share ideas with those working in different sectors, such as school and FE libraries. The first presentation from Ann-Marie Laws, a school librarian in Northumberland, was a great opportunity to find out about an interesting initiative that is happening locally. Ann-Marie is working on a project with Jackie Dunn (from Newcastle University) – ‘Bridging the Divide: Information Literacy – the forgotten link’ – looking into information literacy skills of transitioning students and this will lead to the development of an online learning resource toolkit. I am really interested to see the findings and recommendations of this project.
A key theme discussed in a few of the presentations was how to encourage student participation in training sessions to maintain interest. Asking students to work in groups or pairs to discuss their ideas really helps to reduce their fear of speaking in front of the whole group. Lucy Keating (from Newcastle University) found a low-tech solution to liven up induction for first year undergraduates by using cards outlining examples of information to seek and asking students to discuss in pairs where they would look for that information. This would then lead into a discussion about using relevant academic resources for research. Julia Robinson, also from Newcastle University, demonstrated an effective method of teaching search strategies. Using an example essay question and asking students to work in groups to note down keywords on giant post-its; another low-tech solution to make a session more interactive, is a great way to highlight the range of potential alternative search terms and to demonstrate how terms then need to be combined using Boolean.
The afternoon was rounded off with an ‘ideas clinic’ during which we discussed how to gain credibility and interest in a training session without patronising. This seems to be one of the main challenges when delivering a teaching session, as it is essential to get the group engaged and interested in learning what you have to say. The key tips were:
- make it relevant to the audience by appealing to what they are interested in;
- make the session interactive, and;
- be enthusiastic – if you’re not they won’t think it’s interesting enough to listen to!
Overall, this was a really enjoyable event which definitely gave me plenty of food for thought. And, speaking of food…any event that includes cake on the programme is always a winner in my book!
