Category: Kansas Libraries

Hi blog. It’s been awhile. I wonder if anyone still reads you….

What’s been new? Information Overload presentations. Grad school work. Day job. And DML2012.

DML2012 was. incredible, and had me wishing more librarians had been present.

With the increased focus in some part of our profession on the potentials of maker spaces (read David Lankes’ latest encounters with the Fayetteville Library Fab Lab), media labs, and community spaces for learning, DML2012 was the conference where those situations were on center stage. More librarians needed to be there to join in the conversation — go next year — it’s in Chicago!

Other parts of the conference dealt with gaming, different learning approaches, and other education-related things (sorry to sum it up all so fast). John Seeley-Brown’s keynote set the stage on Thursday. I highly recommend you take some time to watch it online. You won’t regret it.

I spent the rest of the conference attending sessions on maker spaces, and a short talk panel that included sections on a research project into student digital use and Evernote used in an academic library orientation. My notes are somewhere on my iPad in scattered form. The collaborative notes from conference participants is a much better place to gain an idea of the conference.

My other part of the DML Experience was giving an Ignite Talk. Thanks to Buffy’s encouragement, I turned in the idea, “Lifelong Learning @ Your Library from Birth to the Grave.” Surprisingly the conference organizers took the proposal, and I had to give the talk. Eek!

What’s an ignite talk? It’s a five-minute presentation, where the slides auto-advance every fifteen seconds. The presenter prepares the slides and an accompanying script. See Wikipedia for more information.

The video of the talk is supposed to be posted at some point online. But until then, here’s my slide deck. If you view the slideshow on Slideshare and click on the notes tab below the slides, you’ll be able to read the script as you advance through the slides.

The ignite talk was definitely an experience, and I was incredibly nervous. But it was an amazing opportunity to share the awesome possibilities in libraries, especially from the ones here in Kansas. I’ve been using the presentation in our board trustee training this week in response to the future of the library in light of the coming age of eBooks, and it’s been well-received. Kansas, we really do have an awesome library community!