It is wonderful to meet librarians from all over the world. It is also quite expensive.
But our new social technologies change the economy of meetings. We can open up our physical meetings to virtual participants - and we can continue our conversations through the web - after the bodies return home.
Therefore I was happy to stumble across a blog post by my good colleague Niels Damgaard (picture) in the IFLA SL Newsletter.
In January 2009, the next BOBCATSSS conference will be arranged in Portugal.
The Lello bookstore in Porto …
The conference is organized by library students. As their web site shows, they are getting more sophisticated year by year.
I hope to go - and have submitted a workshop proposal, which is registered as paper no. 76. Plugging for LATINA in 2009 is also part of the plan. Top secret, of course.
Resources
If learning and teaching is production rather than reproduction, they turn into research and development.
Ready for exploration.
Academic libraries have always supported research as well as teaching, As the walls go down, libraries and librarians must move deeper into the R&D process - or be bypassed by a new generation of web-oriented students, teachers and scholars.
A trigger is a short video that poses a question, a puzzle or a dilemma - without giving the answer.
Triggers are used to to set off discussions in groups and classes. As part of the LATINA program, our participants have created three triggers - and posted them on YouTube:
The cost of computers continues to fall.
High tide in Venice …
Schools and colleges, students and educators, are sliding into an environment where everybody has instant access to the web - everywhere and all the time.
As a teacher I now have two options. I can try to oppose the tide - or try to rise with the waters that gush in.
Teaching is moving - slowly - from paper to digital technology.
Replacement
The first step is replacement:
The long civil war in Sudan destroyed much of the educational infrastructure in the South.
After the peace agreement between North and South in 2005, reconstruction began. Norway is involved in a program to develop university education in the South. Three of the participants in the LATINA course, from the Upper Nile University, come from this program.
The LATINA summer course uses the blog system WordPress as a shared learning platform.
In addition we asked all participants to create their own blogs at the start of the course. Such course blogs can be used for many different purposes. One of them is focused reflexion. Yesterday we gave the class the following task:
Today we are doing digital stories at LATINA: the concept, discussion, tools and production.
I note that the ALA conference in Anaheim also deals with digital storytelling:
Everyone has a story.
Being able to turn your story to something that can be shared with others enhances self worth and benefits the community overall. Their story lives on after they are gone. As libraries, we have the training and in some ways, duty to document and archive society’s culture and history.
We have the ability to share this knowledge with others that are even outside of our communities through technology.
Summer schools are surprisingly popular - all over Europe
Now I look forward to the new summer school at Oslo University College. The school itself, and the LATINA course, starts on Monday, June 23. We expect about fifteen participants, from China, Croatia, Ethiopia, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, and Russia and Sudan.
The evening, which is celebrated by open air parties and bonfires and, is called Sankthansaften (Jonsok, St. John’s Eve).
