Conference 2.0
I popped in a proposal at HigherEdBlogCon, in the track moderated by the biblioblogosphere’s own Meredith Farkas. And no, this post is not meant to be some kind of insurance that Meredith will accept the proposal; if I get rejection-egg on my face, I’ll live.
(The proposal is, in fact, something I’ve been trying to make myself write for months. With luck, this time I’ll actually do it.)
Since I prefer my chair on the ground as opposed to crammed inside a tin can thirty thousand feet above it, virtual conferences are a natural for me, and I’d like to see more of them. Y’all don’t need to see my ugly mug to benefit from my dubious wisdom; in fact, not seeing it is a positive advantage, trust me. Not to mention that it’s cheaper for all concerned.
Despite its (mildly unfortunate) name, HigherEdBlogCon isn’t about blogging. Well, it’s partly about blogging. But it’s mostly about the constellation of stuff that represents technological progress (with all the strictures and caveats that term implies) in higher education.
Libraries and librarians have been given a whole track of their own—so where, I ask you, is the high-falutin’ Library 2.0 crowd? Oh, right, right, blogs and IM and podcasts and suchlike are what librarians hold their noses and use to communicate with patrons. We use other, better methods to talk to each other, except when résumé-puffing is involved. (And that, in a nutshell, is what I think of “Library 2.0,” which is why I haven’t been blogging about it. My sole hope is that when it goes down in flames along with its buzzword predecessors, it doesn’t take the important stuff—like getting library data out of impregnable silos—down with it.)
Come on, now, academic librarians. We can poke our noses out of ALA long enough to compare notes with the rest of the folks involved in the higher-education enterprise. Can’t we?
Eh, well. Perhaps the con’ll just be us peasants, down on the threshing floor getting stuff done instead of nattering about it. Fine with me. Pass the pitchfork.