I presented on using Mobile Phone Polling to increase student engagement in the classroom. The session was a lot of fun and I always get new ideas from talking to audience members.

In addition to presenting I attended a lot of awesome sessions. Some of my highlight’s of the conference include:

• Your Library Website Stinks and it’s Your Fault - This presentation by Matthew Reidsma is about web usability, focusing your web presence, and the importance of improving your library web site.
• An Introduction to Design Thinking Workshop - Paul Zenke facilitated a fun, hands-on, engaging workshop on user experience and the using the design thinking process to create solutions for libraries.
• An Introduction to jQuery Mobile: Creating Simple Mobile Webpages - A solid workshop and good resources by Brooke Bergantzel and Ian Mason on how to get started creating mobile websites using jQuery mobile (it’s really pretty easy if you know HTML/CSS!)
• Library Data and Student Success - a presentation I heard a lot about (I was presenting at the same time so didn’t see it). Some U of M folks collected pre-existing data from circ stats, analytics, workstation usage, etc. to correlate library usage with student success.

I would recommend this conference to anyone interested in library tech. The keynotes were really inspiring, especially the one from Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium. I will definitely keep this on my radar for future conferences.

Unlike PowerPoint your ideas aren’t confined to a single slide. It’s visually appealing and uses movement and zooming to highlight points and convey ideas.  Prezi also just recently began offering a free educational license that allows students and teachers to create private prezis for free. This tool could be great for use in the classroom to talk about things like narrowing your topic, keywords, or the research process.

Seriously, if you’re someone who does library instruction or presentations, check out Becky’s presentation on Narrowing a Topic. There are a lot of possibilities for this tool. (UPDATED: Becky’s presentations are marked for REUSE so if people want to use her structure and just change the text they can!)

Is anyone else using this tool? Are you using it for instruction or for something else?

But after a little bit the questions became pretty steady, and I was occupied the whole time either talking about my poster or listening to what others are doing. It was a great experience and I’m very glad I submitted a poster. Thinking and talking about it allowed me to understand our library and our situation better. People ask questions that you never think of and you grow and think in different ways because of them. I hope to do more presentations in the future.

For lunch I attended a round table discussion about Emerging Technologies Librarians. It was pleasant to hear from other people who have similar jobs and interests to me. The most interesting thought that came up was is a position like this even going to be necessary in, say, ten years? One would think that by then many of these skills that we possess should be standard among librarians. It is pretty fascinating though how we our pioneers in this area of librarianship. I met a lot of great people there and we even have a facebook group now so feel free to join if you have a similar job and want to network.

A spectacular session called “Mapping Your Path to the Mountaintop” was moderated by Steven Bell, Lauren Pressley, John Shank, and Brian Matthews. My colleague Sarah Cohen captured the gist of the presentation, but a few things jumped out at me. First there are some questions I should be asking myself to have a thoughtful and deliberate career:

• What is my mountaintop (not everyone has the same one)?
• What’s the next step in my career?
• What is the catch phrase for my career path (a fun one)?

Questioning is important in all aspects of our life and our career is no different. Another idea was that publishing and presenting are great tools for advancement and contribution to the field. I would like to do more of both in the near future.

There were two papers at the end of the day that also did some questioning of their own. One was about whether or not LibGuides justify the buzz about them.  It turns out they do, except the 2.0 features do not get as much mileage out of them as we think. The other session was called “If You Build It Will They Care?” This session was especially useful for me in thinking about my own job. I am not immune to technolust and thinking new things are really cool. But the most important thing is building technology services that that are useful and used by students. I think I am doing a pretty good job so far. I haven’t jumped into creating Second Life or Twitter services for our library because I just don’t think that our students are there. But the idea of an environmental survey is a good one and I would like to read their paper and possibly create a survey of my own to find out where students actually are.

I sounded surprisingly knowledgeable up there for one simple reason: I was knowledgeable. Jonathan and I had been working on this for about two months. He asked questions on some listservs and I scoured the web and library blogs for people that had done this before and tried to learn from their experiences. The sources I kept going back to and adapting to my own needs were: a PowerPoint slideshow called “How do you IM?” on the LibrarianInBlack blog, “IM me” by Aaron Schmidt and Michael Stephens, and the Online Reference Best Practices Wiki. They all were very helpful in getting me started. I find it is very useful to use other people’s knowledge. It saves you a lot of the leg work and allows you appear smart even though you are leeching off of these other people’s wisdom.

I demonstrated what the Pidgin software would look like as well as the Meebo chat window, and then we allayed any concerns and answered all the questions that came up. We helped the staff understand what we were actually going to be doing it and why. But I tried never to say that “this is how it is going to be.” I kept telling the staff that their input was needed . I do not want them to think they are getting this imposed on them. I would like to have them all contribute and share their opinions so it can be an effective service.

The meeting went very well, and I even got applause for my presentation. The next step will be staff training. This will begin after winter break since it is always hectic at the end of the semester. I might have to do a little research on how best to go about training staff and getting them comfortable with IM. This is going to be fun.