Edtechkat

LIANZA 2008 has continued to be an open, warm and intellectually stimulating conference.

I liveblogged the sessions I attended on CoverItLive, so there is much more detail here (keynotes) and here (individual sessions). Did I mention that the conference committee have provided free wifi iin return for liveblogging? Thank you very, very much for this. A nice win/win situation.

Here are the main ideas that took my fancy today:

1. Keynote - Professor Mason Durie. Talked about transformational leadership and the need for people to be Future Makers (proactive) rather than Future Takers (reactive). He talked about 5 contexts in which future leadership will take place and gave a New Zealand perspective on these:

• Demographic transitions
• Changes to Technology
• Information Avalanche
• Economic Transitions
• Globalisation

Leadership for tomorrow will require leaders who can look outside their own institutions and make connections and community. He talked of many leaders and I saw a common theme - these were all people who could make links with business for economic support or community groups for social support. Professor Durie suggested that maybe leadership will become a separate career in the future - people with qualities needed for future leadership are hired  specifically to lead, rather than getting people who have been in the organisation for a long time and have risen to the top.

2. Charlotte Clements and Timothy Greig talked about two Instant Messaging projects set up among four universities. They had teams evaluating chat reference - one looking at proprietary purpose-built library reference software and one looking at Open Source solutions. They chose to test QuestionPoint (OCLC) and VRL plus (sirsi dynix) from the vendor based software and look at Psi, Trillian and Meebo for the  Open Source. Eventually they decided to implement meebo - straight away - without a trial. No stats on the usage yet.

The second project involved creating a “toolkit”, with instructions for libraries to implement  in-house instant messaging. Libraries could then adapt it for their users. They chose Pidgin as the chat aggregator - providing an individual account for all staff. They used  Meebo widget for embedding chat in web pages. There was a wiki with instructions and links to downloads.

The brave, brave souls then did a live demo of what a student and staff member would see during an interaction using the setup.

3. Dylan Horrocks session on which comics people should stock in their libraries was just that - cover after cover of really engaging commentary of what each comic was and why it was inportant. The list is in my CoverItLive stream and really, really worth checking out.

4. Keitha Booth gave a very intellectually rigorous paper about Open Government information and Andrew Matangi, one of the originators of NZ Creative Commons, talked about Creative Commons in NZ . Keitha looked at the role of librarians in opening up tax-payer and rate-payer funded information. Although it is data, not collections, we have a role in knowing how to free this up and make it accessible to, and on behalf of, our organisations.  There are a lot of links to useful references and websites in Keitha’s paper. They are really worth following up.

I am sure I will have much more to say tomorrow about Creative Commons after Lawrence Lessig’s keynote (insert intellectual fanboi swoon here).

5. The last session, a keynote from Sydneysider, Mark McCrindle talked about the learning styles of different generations. He’s a presenter who knows his stuff - very few slides and stood in the middle of the stage. After the “hard stuff” that  made us think, he interspersed a funny anecdote or newspaper clipping to  lighten things up before the next major point.

He made the point that we need to use many factors when making predicitons - if you look at the growth rate in Elvis impersonators since 1977, you could feasibly predict that 80% of the world population will be Elvis impersonators by 2018. It was a very information rich presentation - worth checking the liveblog. One of the major take-homes for me was that changes in technology, work  etc mixes up the lifestages- with 20 year olds voting conservative and grannies wearing jeans and going to uni, we cannot necessarily make predictions about someone based on their generation. It is not just GenY people who want to be entertained and stimulated and create their own content online.

Tomorrow I give my workshop about creating scripted objects to go in Second Life libraries (for people without geek superpowers) and Con and I give our session on unconferences.  Add in Lawrence Lessig, a cruise around Auckland harbour and a masquerade ball at night and I think I have another fabbo day to look forward to.