ALIA 6th Annual Top End Symposium

I’m lucky enough to have been in Darwin this week giving the opening keynote for the 6th ALIA Top End Symposium: exploring library spaces for learning and e-learning. I flew up a day early and explored Darwin on bicycle. Just beautiful.

I was excited to be asked and would have loved to have stayed for both Friday and Saturday. Diana Richards from the NT Library and her team were great hosts,  but I needed to fly back to Perth for Library Camp on Saturday. I consoled myself with a 20 minute meet up with my friend Sally who lives in Broome during a stopover on the way back. The papers looked very good – and the two that I heard were great.

Two librarians from Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Education spoke about the way they “non-project managed” the transformation of a totally cramped and crowded tiny space into a flexible learning space that allowed culturally sensitive learning for some of their students who had never been exposed to books before, let alone a library. It was a great example of not over thinking a project. When they came to write the paper, they realised that they had very sound professional goals and a framework that they followed – but without the need for anal Gantt charts. Their tag cloud of the skills they brought to the project is a very nice illustration of this:

I have been working on creating a slidecast (audio track with co-ordinated slides) of my talk for the last couple of days, but with patchy wireless I have not finished it. I will publish it here as soon as I do. It was called “Disco balls, waterless urinals and augmented reality: equipping ourselves to create innovative library learning spaces”.

Just before my talk the convenor, Anne Ritchie, asked whether I was OK with putting my mobile number onto a whiteboard at the front and taking questions via text during my presentation. Yep. Good fun. Unfortunately there was a bit of technical trouble with the PC, so I didn’t get to answer the txt question I received, but I said I’d publish the question and answer here. I mentioned Second Life for less than a minute – in the context of libraries helping their communities understand produsage – but that is what the question is about…