(lib)TeachMeet 2

camlibtm logo by camlibtm on Flickr

Last night I drove across town to the Schlumberger Research Centre, did a wonky reverse park and grabbed my lanyard and human bingo card for the second Cambridge Librarians' TeachMeet. A TeachMeet is an informal, sociable meeting with mini presentations on the themes of techie tools and teaching tips. There is a good explanation of the origins of TeachMeets here. I didn't go to the first TeachMeet back in September, and then was really regretting it after hearing all about it afterwards. So I was really looking forward to yesterday, and happily I wasn't at all disappointed!

There were around 60 people attending (the places had filled up within hours of the booking opening!), and so along with many familiar faces there were many people there who I hadn't met before. Enter human bingo! This turned out to be a fun way of getting to meet everyone very quickly (and finding out if they were ever on TV, whether they catalogue in Voyager, and please oh please tell me they speak British Sign Language?!?)

The main part of the evening was the presentations - a mixture of 5 minute micropresentations and 2 minute nanopresentations. All (and I mean all) of the following presentations were really interesting, and there were a lot of ideas that I am definitely going to try myself. The videos of most of the presentation have gone up on the TeachMeet site now so I've included the links here:

• Liz Osman, Library posters: engaging your students (video)
• Anna Martin, Never write lists again!
• Sarah Pavey, Jigsaws: a first step to academic essay-writing in schools (video)
• Laura Wilkes, Using QR codes to promote ejournals (video)
• Nicky Adkins, Debunking the myth of the Google generation (video) (slides)
• Jo Harcus, Tagging the academic library (video)
• Suzanne Paul, TeuxDeux (video)
• Clare Aitken, Using Tellus Magic to make access to subscribed resources easier (some background information: Adding ezproxy to the url – 5 different methods, EzProxy Bookmarklet Generator, Favourite LibX feature) 
• Naomi Herbert, Using special collections for teaching (video) (Naomi's dissertation)
• John Iona, Embedding information literacy in a competency-based curriculum (video) (slides)

I made a start today by signing up for TeuxDeux, hopefully this will stop me from rewriting my to-do lists so often when they get too illegible! I really liked Nicky's presentation on bringing research skills into the classroom, and her cartoons on her slides are just brilliant. It was also interesting to hear from Laura about her use of QR codes to promote NHS ejournals - we have QR codes on our posters advertising our twitter account, but I've never yet seen anyone scanning them on their phone! During the break we nabbed one of Sarah's essay tips jigsaws and had a go, all in the name of research of course.

Erin and Becky get stuck into the jigsaw

A few people including myself were live tweeting the event, and the hashtag we were using is #camlibtm. I was quite impressed with myself because this is the first time I've actually managed to live tweet something the whole way through, wifi issues and my slow typing on my phone keyboard have meant I've always given up in the past! With the presentations each only being a few minutes long though, it was fairly easy to keep up!

The whole evening was really good fun, and a big thankyou to all of the organisers and all of the presenters for making it so good!