CPD23: Thing 15 – Events and conferences: attending, presenting, organising

Ah, I appear to have fallen behind again. I have a note…

Anyway, onto Thing 15 about events and conferences. I haven’t a lot to write on this one really as so far my experience has been rather limited. I’ve never spoken at an event. At the moment I don’t feel as though I’ve done enough to make a valuable contribution, though I would like to give it a go one day. I’m in awe of all those new professionals who do speak at events and find it inspiring that others can – though it is also a little intimidating and this is perhaps the source of my reticence. I’ve also never organised an event – although I’m good at organising myself I’m not so sure I’d manage to organise others. I’ve only quite recently joined the CDG NE committee so I may have more opportunities to get involved with organising events in the future.

I do have some experience of attending events, however. I really enjoy going to events to learn new stuff, meet new people and generally come away feeling inspired and full of new ideas – all good.  I’ve been fairly lucky in getting support from my employer to attend a couple of events (including the 2010 New Professionals Conference) but mainly I’ve attended free events – including the Toon(lib)TeachMeet earlier this year. North East CILIP organises Mini Umbrella each year and this is another excellent free event. With less money available for training and development anywhere it’s great that there are good free events like this (or fairly cheap ones that I can afford to pay for myself) but it’s definitely worth applying for funding for larger events. Jo’s post for this thing is worth a read for some good tips on applying for funded places at conferences. After missing out on funding for Umbrella this year, I’m keen to try again for funding for future events and conferences.

Toon (Lib)TeachMeet – May the Fourth be with you!

On May 4^th 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!