This afternoon, I am presenting a paper at Educause Australasia 2009 called Why Learning About Emerging Technologies is Part of Every Librarian’s Job .

The slides are rather cryptic in places as there are a lot of images. I recorded audio while I was practicing last night, so when I get time, I will turn this into a slidecast.

You can download the accompanying, peer-reviewed paper from my site here, Why Learning about emerging technologies is part of every librarian’s job (WORD doc). (The conference papers were not available online at the conference site when I made this post).

This morning, Penny Coutas, Peta Hopkins, Con Wiebrands and myself were on the panel for a symposium called Personal Learning Environments: What Works for Librarians.

We ran the session as a discussion. We started out asking the participants what they wanted to find out in the session. This is a technique that Con and I first used at LIANZA as a way to show people how an unconference may work – but it actually looks useful for conference presentations in general.

We focused on going where the participants wanted to go, so we didn’t cover all of the material in our slides (below). Penny Coutas is the clever clogs who made them pretty and found the cartoons on most slides. We also created a wiki where each of us listed the tools that we use everyday, plus a number of unusual tools that we rely on, PLEs: what works for librarians . I found reading everyone else’s favourites just fascinating.