Critical thinking and knowledge bases

November 25, 2009 – 9:22 am

A couple of weeks ago our campus hosted a guest speaker who gave a presentation on assessing critical thinking skills, especially in the context of general education.  (This was part of an ongoing project on our campus to reform our general education curriculum and move more in the direction of assessment of learning outcomes.)

The presentation was engaging and thought-provoking, but one piece in particular stood out to me as particularly relevant to information literacy instruction.  The presenter cited research1 that had been done to try to get at what constitutes generalized critical thinking skills.  This research had focused on expert chess players, because the researchers figured that there were few better models of generalized, disciplinary-context-free thinking skills than chess. So they investigated how expert chess players think, what drives their decision-making, how expert chess players’ thinking differs from novice chess players’ thinking, etc.

What they found, however, was that instead of anything that could be described as generalized thinking skills, what the expert players were drawing on was a vast knowledge base:  of patterns of chess moves, of strategies, of famous games, of players’ personalities and their likelihood of making certain strategic decisions, etc.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

And that got me thinking about information literacy, and specifically, the process of sorting through vast reams of search results to find the relevant and reliable results, and to sort them from the rest.  I’ve recently become more and more aware of the incredibly dense and complex filters that I apply to a set of search results.  Try it yourself with the search results for “affirmative action” in Academic Search Premier that are linked in the image at the right:  how quickly did you pull out the popular magazine article and the editorial; how quickly did you sort the other, more scholarly, treatments into their disciplinary pigeonholes?

It’s astounding to me how quickly, and on how little evidence, I’m able to make these kinds of decisions.  (Admittedly, I sometimes get them wrong!)  And I always have to remind myself that 18-year-olds simply do not have the knowledge base yet to do this as quickly as I do.  Even a hypothetical college senior who had achieved all of the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education couldn’t do it, at least not as quickly as I — or any of you — could.  It’s not a question of the student’s information literacy skills, it’s a question of her knowledge base, or lack thereof.

And that’s my question:  how do we impart that knowledge base to our students?  Can we?  (Should we, is another question I suppose.)  Or is the best we can do, to throw up our hands and say, “go out and live mindfully in the world for twenty years and then come back and ask that question again?”

  1. I’m not sure precisely what the citation is for the research; it was probably the following article, which I have not actually read, because our library doesn’t have it and I’m not about to tax our already-overburdened ILL system just to verify a citation for a blog post. Ahem. Where was I?  Oh yes, the citation:

    Perkins, D. N. and Gavriel Salomon. “Are cognitive skills context bound?” Educational Researcher 18/1 (1989): 16-25. ↩

By Catherine | Posted in Critical thinking, Students | Comments (4)

Classroom management win!

November 12, 2009 – 6:46 pm

This is, in many ways, a post-Immersion success story.

Earlier this week, I taught a one-shot session for an introductory class that had about 15 first-year students and 5 seniors.  As soon as we got started, it became apparent that there was one student, evidently a senior, in the class who simply would not stop chatting with her neighbor. She chatted all through the professor’s introduction, and all through my introduction, and she was loud enough that I could hear her from halfway across the room.  And she was sitting in the front row!

I thought about calling her out on her behavior in a variety of ways, but since the professor hadn’t done anything about it while she had the floor, I didn’t really figure it was my place to do anything public about it either. Various forms of the Stern Librarian Glare weren’t working, so I was kind of at a loss as to what to do.

So I went about working with the class – the first 10-15 minutes were mostly lecture, so it was a real problem – wondering what to do about Chatty Cathy here in the front row.  And then a little voice in the back of my head started whispering, “what would Randy do?”  See, Randy Hensley is one of the faculty members at Immersion, and he does a lot of work with the Teacher track participants on using our bodies and voices as instructional tools.

One of the techniques that Randy advocates is moving around the room – a lot - standing at the sides, the back, wherever you can fit, both to keep the students focused on you, and to emphasize what’s going on in the class.  We’re lucky enough to have a room where usually I can get around the whole perimeter, so I’ve been doing more of this and I really like it.  It’s especially useful when we’ve done a group project and the groups are reporting back to the class:  I move around to stand behind the group who’s reporting, which encourages them to deliver their report to the class, not just to me, and it keeps the class’s attention focused on the group.

So anyway, I was moving around the room, and it occurred to me that not only was Chatty Cathy in the front row, she was on the end of the row.  So as she was chatting, I very casually moved around to stand next to her.  And by “next to her,” I really mean “uncomfortably close to her.”  Like, in her personal space close to her.

And then I did one other thing: under ordinary circumstances, my voice projects pretty well.  I’ve never had a problem being heard in that classroom (or, um, any other room actually), and I generally don’t have to concentrate on projecting in that space.  But this time, I cranked it up to eleven.  I didn’t shout, or do anything that would have been obviously  intentional.  I just…really projected.

And it worked!

It only took a sentence or two of this treatment for Chatty Cathy to stop chatting.  So I moved away from her and continued my class.  A few minutes later, she started up again, so I moved back into position, and she stopped again.  It took a few more back-and-forths for her to get the message, but eventually she got it:  her behavior was unacceptable, and I wasn’t going to tolerate it in my classroom.

I’m not at all sure what the other 19 students in the class took away from the session, but as far as I’m concerned, getting this one student to stop an inappropriate behavior made it a success.

By Catherine | Posted in In the classroom, Students | Comments (0)

If you need a flowchart to cite an article, you’re doing it wrong

October 15, 2009 – 8:08 pm

APA_flowchartSo the APA just recently published a new edition of their style manual, the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.  And hoo, boy: what a mess.  Among other things, they’ve made substantial changes to the way writers are supposed to cite journal articles accessed online, especially via licensed subscription databases.

This blog post is likely to get a bit ranty, so just to keep myself focused on the topic at hand, let me get a couple of preliminary mini-rants off my chest first:

  • The MLA just released a new edition of their style manual last spring.  Two at the same time?  Shoot me now.  Librarians across the continent have been scrambling to update guides, figure out which citation tools are working with which editions of which manuals, figure out which faculty members are working with which manuals (real quote from a faculty member:  “there’s another new edition? I haven’t updated to the last new edition yet!”) etc.  I think it’s all a terrorist plot.
  • The first printing needed seven supplemental pages of corrections for all the errors that made it through the publication process.  Seven pages of corrections? Did nobody proofread the danged thing?  (Inside Higher Education has a great piece on the errors and corrections; my favorite bit is when the editorial director for APA books says that the manual was “very complicated to put together.”  Um, yeah, it’s a style manual:  of course it’s complicated.  It’s your job to make sure it’s also correct.

Okay, so now that we’ve got those things taken care of, let’s get down to discussing the changes for how to cite articles obtained through subscription databases:

First off, the new style dictates that if there is a digital object identifier (DOI) for an article, you should include it in your citation.  All well and good.  I have nothing against DOIs; they’re mighty handy things, and I can imagine that, like ISBNs, they will only become more widely-used and understood by the academic community.  There will surely be some education required for students (and, dare I say it, faculty) about DOIs:  what they are, how to identify them, etc., but I think they’ll catch on quickly.  Look at how quickly students picked up on the usefulness of ISBNs once they discovered online purchasing of textbooks.  Now, sending authors (read: students) to sites like crossref.org to try to find a DOI when it’s not included in the index or on the first page of the article is an added complication that I don’t think anyone is happy about, but again:  it’s not a huge deal.

No, the huge deal is here:  what you’re supposed to do if there is no DOI for the article.  As I read the flowchart, in most cases where there is no DOI, and you accessed the article through a licensed database, you’re supposed to list the homepage URL of the journal.

Say what now?

Take a moment to think about this.  Say a student found an article in the Journal of Underwater Basketweaving through Academic Search Premier.  She’d have to construct a citation that looked like this (apologies for the lack of hanging indent):

Oliver, C. D. (1981). New developments in basketology: Weaving the strands toward a new science. Journal of Underwater Basketweaving, 3, 153-168.  <http://www.basketology.org>.

Now, there are three kinds of problems with this rule: logistical problems, practical problems, and epistemological problems.

Logistical Problems

The APA guide makes a passing reference to “oh, you may have to do a quick web search to find the publisher of the journal, but it shouldn’t be too big of a deal.”  Oh, really?  When journals change publishers on a regular basis, and old websites linger in Google’s cache?  When multiple iterations of a journal title (Journal of Sociology, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of the Sociological Association of America, Journal of Sociological Research) abound? Does a URL, copied in 2009, that looks like this: http://www.elsevier.com/basket_journal do a reader in 2011 any good if that journal was sold to Wiley in 2010?

Practical Problems

If, as I’ve always assumed, the point of a citation is to give the reader the necessary information to locate the full text of the item in question, how exactly does having the home page of the journal (or its publisher) help the reader?  While open access is a fine and grand thing, it isn’t exactly the coin of the realm, nor is that situation likely to change drastically in the near future.  Most articles on most publishers’ web sites, if they’re there at all, are only available for a fee to subscribers.  Any researcher who’s going to attempt to locate a source cited in an APA-format paper is going to go (we fervently hope) to his/her institution’s licensed resources first, not to the publisher’s home page.  So that URL, even if it is still accurate when it’s read years later, is practically useless.

Epistemological Problems

Again, the purpose of the citation:  it’s essentially saying to the reader, “here is where I found this information.”  By citing the home page of the journal, the author is essentially saying, “I found this information at http://www.basketology.org.”  When s/he did nothing of the sort:  s/he found it in Academic Search Premier, or PsycINFO, or JSTOR, or wherever.  How on earth are we supposed to explain and justify this to our students?  When we tell them, “you have to cite your sources so that your reader can find the same information that you found,” how does that URL fit into the plan?

The answer is, it doesn’t.  It doesn’t make any sense at all to me, and it smacks of intellectual dishonesty.  You know, the kind of thing we’re supposed to be socializing our students not to do.  Which is why I think it’s a load of bunk, and I’m sorely tempted to simply advise students to cite the article as though it was print and just ignore all the madness.

In fact, that’s exactly what I advised a faculty member recently, when she told me she had a stack “this high” of printouts of articles that she’d downloaded from CINAHL, but she had no idea when (this was when retrieval dates were still part of APA style).  “What am I supposed to do about the retrieval dates for these?” she asked.  “Ignore it,” I told her, “just cite them as though they were print.  Your reader will still be able to find the sources, and that’s all that matters.”

Update, 10/21/09:  Barbara Fister, writing for ACRLog, covers much the same ground, with way more style and panache than I’ve managed here, plus ties the whole issue into carbon footprints!

By Catherine | Posted in Reference, Students | Comments (4)

On the uses of Wikipedia: Noted almost without comment

September 25, 2009 – 12:28 pm

My husband, Chris Cobb, wrote to me recently:

I was twigged to a most exciting (for a medievalist, that is) news story last evening that I wanted to pass along to you, just because. It was announced today that the largest Anglo-Saxon hoard ever discovered has recently been found in Staffordshire, England. It is several times larger than the Sutton Hoo treasure, and full of exquisitely crafted pieces.

If you’d like to take a look, the website that the curators have developed is here:

http://www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/

I will add that, in a supremely ironic twist, I picked up this story as I was watching a video on [Daily Kos] of Michael Moore being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN about “Capitalism:  A Love Story.”  While Michael Moore was doing an absolutely devastating takedown of the vacuous and insinuating questions that Blitzer was asking, “Largest Anglo-Saxon Hoard Discovered” flashed across the “Breaking News” line.  I finished watching the interview, which was awesome, and then flipped over to Wikipedia, figuring that they would have the best information, and they did.  It was in their “in the news” section, they already had a detailed entry written up about it (the public story broke today!), and a link to the official website.  ….  It’s not every night that the archaeological find of the century is announced…

Anyway, I thought you might find the story amusing, and the artifacts are worth a look:  they are astonishing.

Mad props to Wikipedia!

By Catherine | Posted in Off-topic blather | Comments (1)

What am I doing differently this semester?

September 23, 2009 – 2:53 pm

So the instruction season is in full swing (I have 5 sessions for three classes this week, and 4 sessions for two classes next week, yikes!) and I’m back from Immersion, so I’m sure you’re waiting with baited breath to find out how Immersion has transformed my information literacy instruction!

Wait, you’re not? Oh.

Well, I’m going to tell you anyway, so there.  What I’m doing this semester is … actually, not all that different from what I was doing before.  Which is kind of depressing and is making me feel rather useless.

Here’s what’s different:

  • I’m writing the learning outcomes up on the board at the beginning of class, and when it’s possible, I leave them there throughout the class period (we don’t have much whiteboard space, so sometimes I have to erase them).  I’d always talked through them at the beginning of class, but having them up there reinforces the structure of the class, and maybe helps address multiple learning styles.
  • I’ve experimented a little bit with asking the students to help me prioritize which learning outcomes to spend the most time on, and which to spend the least time on.  In two cases, I’ve been able to do this ahead of time (not, as I had hoped, via Blackboard, sigh) and in a couple of cases I’ve done it on the fly at the beginning of class.  In one of the cases where I asked them in advance, I got really good information that I’ll use to construct a session on completely different tools and skills than I’d planned to do — the session is next week, so we’ll see how it goes.  In at least one of the cases where I did it on the fly, and the students said, “oh yes, we know how to do this, you don’t have to spend any time on it,” it became apparent later in the session that no, they did NOT know how to do that.  Oops.  I’m not sure what to do about that.
  • I’ve asked students to come up and “drive” the instructor’s computer a couple of times. This has worked out fine but hasn’t felt revolutionary, almost more like a gimmick.  I’m going to keep trying it, though.
  • When I teach search strategy, I use a handout that helps them brainstorm keywords and combine them using AND and OR.  In yesterday’s class, I collected the handouts, and I intend to make comments and suggestions and then return them to the students via the professor.  This both gives the students feedback on their work and an additional contact with me, and also allows me to assess how well they did on the worksheet.  Over time, I hope to develop a rubric for assessing the worksheets and start building a collection of data for assessing their learning.  The only drawback is, I just created a big pile of work for myself: clever, that!

What hasn’t changed:

  • I’m still doing the same blasted “construct a Boolean search; run it in an EBSCO database and sort your results; use the article linker to get full text” lesson plan I’ve been doing over and over and over. And over.  Because it’s what the professor wants.  And it’s what the students need, primarily.  It’s pretty effective, but inevitably I’ll have one or two students in the class who’ve seen me do the same schtick once or twice before, and they’re totally checked out.  And I’ll have anywhere from one or two, to a bunch, of students who really struggle with search strategy, which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole rest of the class, if they can’t construct a coherent search to start with.

I’m really not sure what to do about this situation, or how to get around the Golden Oldie lesson plan that I always get asked to do.  For the assignments our professors give (most of the time), it’s what (most of) our students need.  And until we get some mechanism to provide some baseline IL instruction in their first year or two, we’ll still have students who reach their junior or senior years and still don’t have the first clue how to string more than one keyword together. (Seriously. I taught some seniors, writing their comps, this week, and some of them had a heck of a time with it.)

But I’m going to keep plugging away, trying to do better, and hope that the new General Education program will give me some leverage to work with.

I do hope to be able to do a no-demonstration class in the near future, and I have high hopes for a history senior comps class I’ll be teaching next week (I may even show them OAIster!) and an intro communication class I’ll also be teaching next week.  But the sense that I should, after all that time and energy at Immersion, be doing better than this is very strong.

By Catherine | Posted in In the classroom, Instruction, Students | Comments (2)

Upgraded to WordPress 2.8.4

September 6, 2009 – 8:20 pm

There’s a really nasty worm out there that’s attacking WordPress blogs, so if you’ve got one, and you’re a lazy bum like me and haven’t upgraded to the latest version of WordPress (2.8.4), please do so!

By Catherine | Posted in Off-topic blather | Comments (0)

Beginning of a new semester

September 4, 2009 – 8:57 am

We’re at the end of the second week of classes already here at Saint Mary’s, and believe it or not, I’ve already done two instruction sessions — one of which was at 8:00 a.m., heaven help me.  I’ve got big plans for this semester, including incorporating a bunch of stuff that I learned last summer at Immersion, and working toward building a curriculum-integrated information literacy program in our Nursing department, which I hope will serve as a model for other departments at the college.  We’re also putting the final touches on our new General Education program, which we now know will include information literacy outcomes as part of a first-year seminar, so that’s another exciting step forward.  It really feels like there’s so much potential here, just on the verge of blossoming forth.

But in all the rush and bustle of the beginning of the semester, I haven’t managed to post here about an example of fulfilled potential that just blossomed forth right under our very noses!  I am delighted to announce the launch of the Cushwa-Leighton Library’s new, completely redesigned and rebuilt web site!  Here’s a quick screenshot:

I can’t take much direct credit for it — it’s been a massive collaboration between the staff and librarians here at the library, our web guys in the college’s Marketing and Communications department, and our wonderful web designer — but I’m very, very pleased with how it’s turned out.  It’s built on Drupal, so it offers us an easy way to distribute the work of updating and maintaining the site, while maintaining consistent formatting and clean, standards-compliant code across the whole site.

We’re still fixing a few bugs here and there, and I’ve got a wish list of additional features that I’d love to get implemented.  But the core functionality is there, and we’re already getting positive feedback from our faculty and staff.  We’ll be doing user testing with students and faculty later this fall, and I’m really curious to hear what they have to say about it.  In the mean time, we’re just basking in the glow of a really really big, and nearly completed, project.

By Catherine | Posted in SMC Library web redesign | Comments (1)

Help the Louisville Free Public Library

August 5, 2009 – 10:25 am

Hey folks, Louisville just got slammed with some huge thunderstorms — reports indicated something like 6 inches of rain in 75 minutes — that caused flash flooding, leaving about 4 feet of water in the main branch of the Louisville Free Public Library.  Their book processing area, bookmobiles, and server rooms were pretty much destroyed, as well as staff offices and $50,000 worth of new computers for a new branch that’s about to open up in a couple of weeks.  Initial estimates put the damage at over $1 million.

You can see pictures of the devastation here (this one shows the office of a guy I kind of know from the interwebs — the water level is at the doorknob of his office door).

A disaster recovery fund has been established; you can mail a check to:
The Library Foundation
301 York Street
Louisville, KY 40203

And if you’re one of those goofy Library Society of the World types (like, um, me), you can join in a coordinated fundraising drive that Steve Lawson is running, which is PayPal-enabled for easy clickage.  I’ll be sending a check to Steve because I’m PayPal illiterate, but I know and trust Steve (actually, I know and trust Steve better than PayPal, go figure).  Take your pick, but every little bit helps.

DON’T SEND BOOKS

First of all, the book processing area of the library is still underwater, so they can’t receive any books you might send them.  And we learned after Katrina that your idea of the books that a library might need often doesn’t match up with what the librarians, staff, and patrons know that they actually need.  So please don’t send books at this time. The LFPL has an Amazon wishlist, which is an awesome way for the public to contribute books that the library really needs, but again, they can’t receive those books, so until you hear otherwise (and I’ll update this post when I hear about it), just let that sit for a while.   They’re smart people, so I’m guessing they’ll be adding a bunch of stuff to that wishlist soon.

By Catherine | Posted in Helping out, Professional issues | Comments (3)

Back from Immersion!

August 3, 2009 – 8:35 am

Gulf of MexicoSo I got back from ACRL’s Immersion program at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida late on Friday night and I’m still processing all of it. As anyone who’s been to Immersion will tell you, it’s intense.  It’s four and a half days of probably the most focused, hard thinking, never-slacking-off work I’ve done since…well, at least since the summer before I did my comps in grad school (the first time around, not the cheesy comps we did for our MLS).  Possibly not since college.  One person in my cohort described it as “imagine your worst week in college.”  That about captures it.

We were going from 8:15 or 8:30 in the morning,1 straight through the evening most days.  Monday we went right through until 9:00 pm; Tuesday we had some “free” time after dinner with some “optional” activities; Wednesday evening was a beach party2 — fun, but exhausting — and Thursday night we were all cramming to get our final projects done before the opening plenary at 8:30 on Friday morning.  I knew this going in, but I keep having to explain it to people:  it’s not like a conference, where you can decide to skip out on a session or two and go do something fun or relaxing, and you can’t just sit in the back of a presentation and mentally check out for a while.  They take their active learning damned seriously at Immersion, and for very good reason.

In at least one respect, the intensity was good, because it kept me distracted from the fact that I was about 1,200 miles from my husband and son for five and a half days, and that even though my parents came up to help out for a couple of days, Chris was really taking on a huge chunk of responsibility in order for me to do this thing.  I’m terribly grateful to him for enabling me to go, and I now know that I don’t want to spend that much time away from my family again for a long, long time.

A lot of librarians find Immersion to be a truly transformative experience:  they come out feeling like their whole idea of what good teaching looks like has been turned completely on its head — in a good way, though, and with the energy and enthusiasm to make that vision of good teaching happen on their campuses.  That didn’t happen for me, mostly because I had the terrific good fortune to work with Megan Oakleaf in my first post-MLS job, at the NCSU Libraries where Megan was the Instruction Coordinator at the time.  Megan is one of the Immersion faculty; she works primarily with the Assessment track, but has also done the Teacher and Program tracks.  So the core principles of Immersion — learning outcomes, authentic assessment, student-centered active learning — were already familiar to me going in.  My experience was more like an enrichment program, fleshing out the skeletal ideas I’d gotten from my “Immersion Lite” mentorship with Megan, and deepening my understanding of how to put it all together.

One thing that did surprise me, though, was how much I enjoyed some of the right-brain-y kinds of things we had to do:  one day we had to use crayons and pens to color a paper bag puppet of our most or least favorite student, and introduce him/her to the group.  On one of the first days, we had to choose the word that, for us, best matched “authentic” and then draw a picture of it.  Another day we used Play-Doh to sculpt “idea” and explain it to the group.  (This was my favorite, because I do love me some Play-Doh.)  I don’t have much patience for “woo-woo” stuff, so usually I take a very dim view of these kinds of activities.  But last week, I totally got into them, and I have no earthly idea why.  Maybe because all my left-side brain muscles were all worn out, I don’t know.  But I’m going to continue to think about them.  And maybe bring some Play-Doh to my instruction sessions….

I did some fun and new things too:  I took my first ever yoga class (interesting, both invigorating and relaxing, but not something I’m going to bend over backwards [har har] to fit into my schedule).  I put my feet in the Gulf of Mexico for the first time (unbelievably warm and not at all refreshing on a hot day) at the beach party.  I saw egrets, ibis, and a pelican3 — on campus — and lots of tiny little lizards.  I can now say I’ve been to Florida, and I can also say that I don’t exactly have a burning desire to go back.  I finally videotaped myself doing instruction (though I have yet to actually see the tape).  I rode in the back of a Ford Explorer, driven by a guy I’d never met whose name I didn’t even catch, on a harebrained run to CVS with seven other librarians.  I did not do karaoke.

But the important thing is, I have an action plan for things I can do immediately, with virtually no preparation, to make my instruction better.  And I have a list of larger things I can work on over the next semester or two, to make my instruction even better.  And I have a vision of what really really good instruction looks like, and the confidence and imprimatur of Immersion to say, “no really, I know this sounds crazy but I do know what I’m talking about.”

  1. Though I have to point out that when I looked at the schedule, my first thought was, “wait, you mean all I have to do by 7:45 in the morning is get up, get dressed, and go to the dining hall for breakfast?!??  This is luxurious!”  On an ordinary day, by 7:45 I’ve gotten both myself and James dressed, fed, out the door, and am on my way to work after dropping him off at daycare.  Mornings were a breeze for me. ↩
  2. And let me tell you: you really haven’t lived ’till you’ve sung “YMCA” but substituted the letters “ACRL,” or seen a tattooed (female) librarian sing AC/DC’s “Big Balls.” ↩
  3. One of the ibis actually wandered into a plenary on Thursday, poor thing. ↩
By Catherine | Posted in Assessment, In the classroom, Instruction, Professional issues | Tagged | Comments (4)

Off to Immersion!

July 24, 2009 – 8:27 am

Today is my last day in the office before heading out on Sunday to fly to Eckerd College outside of St. Petersburg, Florida, for ACRL’s week-long Immersion program! Ever since I got my library degree, I’ve been told by everyone and anyone, “oh, you simply MUST go to Immersion!” Every time I turn around, I meet another fabulous person who’s been to the program and had a great experience there.

Well, I finally have a job where Immersion is actually relevant, and I finally have some (very, very generous) professional development money to support my attendance, so I’m finally going, and I’m really really excited about it.1

So I expect I’ll be back in a week with lots of new ideas and new professional contacts.  I already know two people who are going:  my library-school classmate Jenny Emanuel, and my former co-worker at the NCSU Libraries Amy Gustavson.  And I “know” two other attendees through Twitter:  Dana Longley (@disobedientlib) and Jessica Hagman (@hagman).  Gotta remember to put both my business cards and my Moo cards in my luggage…

  1. Though I must say, did it have to be in South Florida, in late July, this year?  It couldn’t have been in, say, Minneapolis?  Or Portland?  Bangor?  One or two years ago it was in Vancouver!  Oh well, I expect that I’ll be spending 99% of my time in the (air-conditioned) conference center anyway. ↩
By Catherine | Posted in Instruction, Professional issues | Comments (2)