Disco balls, waterless urinals and augmented reality: equipping ourselves to create innovative library learning spaces

A month ago I visited Darwin to keynote the 6th ALIA Top End Symposium: exploring library spaces for learning and e-learning. I promised to publish my slides and a recording of what I said within the week. Well – I’m zooming through a backlog of professional and household tasks, so here it is.

I wrote the abstract for my talk several months ago, and it looked like this:

What skills do library staff need to evaluate whether innovations spaces are suitable for their users? How can they plan and implement these nimbly? In this keynote, Kathryn Greenhill reviews the physical spaces created in some of the most innovative libraries in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and the Netherlands. She examines some of the tools and opportunities for creating new online spaces. She suggests two ingredients that are essential if we are going to create our libraries as effective learning spaces.

When I sat down to write the talk,  I found that I talked a lot more about serendipitous learning, or “guerrilla  learning”  – learning that is beyond a curriculum – and whether this should be a core purpose for libraries. I still managed to slip in heaps of photos of the best libraries I’ve visited in the last couple of years.

Here is the slideset that I used, synchronised with audio of a practice in my bedroom a couple of days before -  Disco balls, waterless urinals and augmented reality: equipping ourselves to create innovative library learning spaces. Slides 118 – 148 are out of sync with the audio. They changed too quickly for slideshare’s slidecast tool to cope with.