Tag: talks

four talks in six days in two countries

Posted on by jessamyn

If the title sounds familiar, it’s because it is. I’ve been trying to combine more of my public speaking trips which means more weird weeks like this one and that one, but it works out a lot better on my end. After I got back to Massachusetts from Access, I drove over to NELA and gave three talks there. I really enjoy NELA but there were some complications this time around mostly involving iffy wireless (and hotel staff who were just repeating what their outsourced IT told them which the IT-librarians knew was a little fishy-sounding, but I digress) which means I wasn’t doing much blogging and had a period of radio silence here and on Flickr and on Scrabulous, etc.

I got home today and I’ve uploaded the latest talks. One was all new, one was a modified version of an earlier talk and one was a talk I gave earlier, but with twice as much time. All of them went really well but I have a sore throat and will be heading to bed as soon as they’re linked here so that I can be bright and bushytailed for work which starts tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who made my trip easier, more pleasant, and fun.

Access 2007 – quick report from the floor

Posted on by jessamyn

My talk went well. It was scary (keynote!), early (8:30!), and multimedia (slides, video, me doing the blah blah part). I have this problem basically not being able to remember a thing I said after I get off the microphone BUT this time I wrote the talk out first, and this time I think it was even recorded. I’ll keep you posted on that. Here are my slides, notes and some more links. Thanks to everyone who paid close attention, blogged about it, and/or laughed at my jokes, and thanks to the conference planners for inviting me and encouraging me to make the trip.

five talks in five days in two countries

Posted on by jessamyn

So. I just got back from a weeklong trip that took me to Somerville, Nova Scotia and environs, and the Manchester/Hooksett New Hampshire area. You can see some photos. This is what I did there.

  • I went to a brown bag lunch with the Dalhousie students which I mentioned a few days ago. It was really a good time. It was the first brown bag lunch session of the year and there was a big group of first and second year students there, as well as a few faculty members. People had done their homework and had really interesting questions to ask me from many different facets of what I do. We had a nice talk.
  • I helped Ryan Deschamps kick off the Learning 2.0 program he is doing at Halifax Public Libraries. I gave a talk on Learning 2.0 called Smart Tiny Tech and hung around for some of the other activities. The Learning 2.0 program is such a fun and non-threatening way to get people really digging under the hood learning some technology topics, I love seeing it being rolled out.
  • I gave a talk at NSLA about Library 2.0 topics, a little more “big picture” and a little less specific. I like doing this talk because I can always take the general outline and add local 2.0 examples so it doesn’t look like all 2.0 development is at Ann Arbor District Library and a few other techie-seeming places. My favorite new find was the Natural Resources Library of Canada (Ottowa) and their del.icio.us links.
  • Sunday I came home to the states, but not quite back to Vermont. Today I went to the NHLA Everything You Always Wanted to Know About 2.0 workshop where I presented with Andrea and Lichen. I gave a talk about Flickr and del.icio.us and one about Open Source Software which was a modification of Eric Goldhagen’s open source talk that I linked to here (direct link to his ppt). Then we stuck around for the gadget session and the geek session where we actually got a significant amount of hands-on time with the things we had been talking about. This was a really great and often-overlooked thing to be able to do.

Now I’m home and I’m uploading pictures and digging through backed up email and getting ready to start my work week tomorrow after some serious time off. Thanks to everyone who made the trip not just possible but enjoyable. update: Lichen has links to her talks and notes from the day up as well.

NH – 2.0 talk in September

Posted on by jessamyn

I was trying to figure out a fix for my sidebar calendar and was testing it out with one of my upcoming events which, thanks to my general cluelessness wound up posted to the front page, not queued for later. So I’ve fixed some of the erroneous info and am reposting it official-like. If you are interested in this at all, contact Andrea Thorpe at the Richards Free Library and check out their nifty blog while you are stopping by.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lib 2.0
in Hookset, New Hampshire

9:00 – 9:30 Registration & Coffee
9:30 What is WEB 2.0 and why it’s important/appropriate in libraries – Lichen Rancourt
10:00 Flickr & del.icio.us – Jessamyn West
10:30
11:00 Library 2.0 catalog solutions – Lichen Rancourt
11:30 Open source replacements for stuff you already use – Jessamyn West
12:00 Box Lunch
1:00 Technology planning. How to choose and implement what you have seen today within the limits of staff time, library budgets and patron needs – Andrea Mercado
2:00- 3:00 GEEK Sessions – Our three presenters (joined by Bobbi
Slossar) will break into small groups to answer your specific questions
about social software issues.
3:00 – 3:30 GEEK Session discoveries and wrap up – Mary Ann List

be social – explaining social networks to librarians and parents

Posted on by jessamyn

I did a short tour of some New Hampshire libraries over the past few days. I did a little talk called MyWhat? Decoding social technologies.. It’s only about five slides but most of it was doing a tour of some of the more popular social networks [Facebook, MySpace, Flickr] and showing how they worked, how kids were using them and what parents and librarians should know.

Remember that a lot of the digital divide that we deal with now isn’t that people don’t have computers per se, it’s that they’re not in networks and groups of people that understand them and can answer complex questions about them. The library is often an integral link in this equation. A lot of my time at these talks is spent answering questions about how these social tools work, how I use them, how librarians might use them, and how kids and teens can use them safely and effectively. A lot of the print materials I’ve come across err on the side of caution which is not a bad idea but often there’s no “Hey you really SHOULD try this” couterpoint. I hope I was able to offer that somewhat.