[CPD23] Thing 15: Events

Attending

I've been fortunate enough to have been able to go to lots of events this year. I went to the CILIP New Professionals Open Day in October, which was a brilliant way to start off. It would be very easy to start off a new job (especially one that has the word "trainee" in the job title!) feeling as if I should keep my head down until I've learnt more, and not interfere with what the professionals are doing. But at NPID2010 many of the presenters were people with only a few years of experience, who had got stuck in and got involved in everything they could, which was incredibly inspiring.

Other things I've been to this year have ranged from a TeachMeet to the New Professionals Conference in Manchester a few months ago. I've made a point to blog about events as soon as possible afterwards, as otherwise I find the details and even important points slip away fairly quickly.

LibCampUK is coming up in October - I was a bit wary of this at first as the concept seemed very loose! But now it seems like almost everyone in my Twitter feed is going so I'm glad I did sign up, will be nice to meet a lot of people face-to-face finally! I would love to go to a huge conference like the IFLA conference or ALA annual, but would definitely require a helping hand from a conference bursary to be able to do that!

Speaking

I'm good at other things though...

I haven't presented at any events, and I can't see it happening any time soon! I think it's best to play to your strengths. I'm a pretty awful public speaker so while I could happily write a paper, it would probably do more harm than good to my career for me to get up and present it! At the Libraries@Cambridge conference in January the trainees put on a presentation about the Graduate Trainee scheme in Cambridge, and since there were seven of us which would be rather a lot to get up on stage and speak, we split ourselves into writers and presenters and it worked very well.

Organised 

I haven't done any organising for conference type events, but  I'd feel more confident about doing so after having been involved in organising various events for Cam23 2.0. We've had a launch party and are currently thinking about the wrap event, and we've had a couple of reflection week meet ups in between. So far most things have gone very smoothly - Doodle has been great for deciding dates and times, and having a team of organisers means that when I forget something someone else will remind me! Always important. There have been one or two hiccups along the way, but again, these are  much easier to overcome with a good team.

(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!