(Just a follow up from last night to say that F, the map librarian, was superb in the lead role. Well worth going to see. And in the second most embarrassing incident of the week I discovered this morning that his love interest was the catholic chaplain - completely unrecognizable in a wig!) [1]

The main event of the day, however, was a workshop on Web 2.0 that I've been preparing to lead all week. Offered to university staff, I had six turn up which wasn't bad. They seemed to enjoy it and get a lot out of it, but I could have been tighter and remembered a handout and a couple of other things. The activity I got them doing, sort of blogging on paper and then 'tagging' with post-it notes and commenting with more post-its, seemed to go well. (Except for a member of library staff who came along and got a bad case of writers' block!)


[1] And only reinforces my idea that I usually get far too sucked into a performance to think of the actors as real people. (My brother-in-law still won't let me forget not spotting "Lt Cdr Data" in the movie _Independence Day_).

Pension briefing this morning.

Nothing more likely to depress you about the future and the fears it holds. On the upside if I die today my family gets a sizeable lump sum. Cheery thought.

In the afternoon we had a presentation on what we can expect from school leavers. Which only goes to depress you in the other direction. (Irritation at your own past including teachers who clearly wouldn't meet even such standards as there are today and fears about your own children not getting the education they're capable of.)

Still, tonight the map librarian has the first performance of the amateur dramatic play he's in. And I'm looking forward to it even if I couldn't persuade anyone to come with me. But Wodehouse should be good value whatever the production is like.

It must be course committee meeting time again. I had another today which I thought started at 2pm but actually started at 1. Not to worry. Even an hour late I still caught two hours of it, so I'm really glad I *was* late - especially as the stuff that I really participate in comes later in the agenda. But I do feel it could have been more tightly chaired. Isn't that always the way? It was no different at TheOldPlace though.

One of the scary aspects of my new (can I still say that after two+ years?) job is that I have to appraise an assistant. I can't say I'm looking forward to it or feel that I know what I'm doing - even after today.

They have a course for appraisers which I have to attend and that took the morning. It was good and helpful. But only exposes my worst fears about my inadequacy at doing this kind of thing well. I'm sure the actual process won't be that bad and D is friendly enough soul that I don't think between us we'll be lost for words. But I don't want it to be the kind of thing she does because it's expected but is of no real value. I'd like to think that she feels it's valuable and worthwhile. But I doubt my ability to make it so.

Chaplaincy today had one of their semi-regular Monday events on 'researching with integrity' which was an interesting look at the moral and ethical dimensions of how researchers behave. (The speaker's main thesis was that it was something we should live and 'be' rather than a set of policy guidelines that we sign up to).

These things are quite informal (projector/laptop on a coffee table projected on the wall; sit around in a half circle with coffee available) but I was surprised that only three people as well as myself had decided to come. The fact that one of them was my Head made it a bit library heavy.

Most embarrassing moment of the week: When I arrived I noticed the keystoning on the projector was way off so we weren't looking at a rectangle but an odd trapezoid. I thought I'd fix it (as this is my job elsewhere and they know me well enough in chaplaincy that I feel quite at home there), but in sorting that the projector decided to switch itself off. Now it may not have been me - but it certainly looked like it. I'd have sorted it out, but the presenter - fairly senior - told me not to worry. Twice. I took the hint. As there were only a handful of us we could all see his laptop screen in any case. Fortunately these days they're large enough for that kind of arrangement to work. And at least we didn't have the projector hum.... but it will teach me not to mess.

Some thoughts on the conference:

- interesting seeing - in real life - a University more known for it's distance learning and virtual aspects (seemed kind of ironic given the conference theme - apparently the organizers considered doing it all in Second Life but then decided there was too much value to be gained from the networking and f2f communication that goes on in the real world. Interesting.

- felt I got to know the academics from this place that I travelled with a little bit better.

- still processing the 'aftermath' and absorbing some of what I experienced. It will take time, but there's lots to read and explore. (Not to mention taking the plunge with Twitter).

- after some hassles due to my hard drive space being full (again), I've managed to download the PowerPoint of the final keynote from RR. Great reminder of what he said and some things I can recycle, plus some inspiration on how to do presentations in the future. (He's from the same school of fill your slide with a gorgeous photo and few words that H is (my colleague who started here at the same time I did)).

- I've no idea if they have plans to run this conference again, but definitely put me on the mailing list!

Probably just had the most directly useful talk of the conference given that it was about a particularly library's implementation of themselves in Second Life.

Here are some notes from the session (very notey!):

“Get away from just recreating physical building – we wanted to do something a little more innovative”

Callimachus as a librarian in SL, who would morph regularly into different sorts of shapes/concepts whenever a student called him/her/it from wherever they were on the island

providing links directly in the environment to some search tools, but still some ambivalence as to where search fits in here, searching in here (SL) is a bit of an unknown

how do we work with publishers who put restrictive licences on work and get them to engage with the students using this content?

reuse, repurpose, students being able to say “I’ve found this really useful bit of text, video or whatever”. Thinking hard about being less transmissional and gated and more collaborative and creative.
More creative engagement with the material.


Risks encountered along the way
- initial lack of technical skills within the Library Team to implement rapid prototyping of service development
- reliance on technical implementation team and broader prioritization needs of the project
- tight deadlines and available project funds
- identification of existing suitable services for embedding with a 3D env
- working with publishers
- requirement for high spec machines to access and use SL
- balancing the need to create equitable services being delivered into parallel learning environment (VLE and SL)


Further Development
- working with publishers and suppliers to enable the creative reuse of content
- populating infrastructure
- reviewing existing licenses
- piloting the embedding of emerging HelpDesk services
- working collaboratively with students to develop more tools and services which meet their requirements
- evaluation

Q&A
“powerful ability to support social networking”
“Fun and genuine research – possibilities are endless”
Need to work closely with students
Gives library opportunity to engage in providing new types of skills and services
Fought hard not recreate library building
Need to take authentication barriers down and need to do things creatively rather than just ‘serve it up’

I'm fed up.

No, not that sort of fed up.

Full of food and thought. It's been a full couple of days (one more session of three papers left and then the wrap up from RR which I'm looking forward to as I've been a fan of his for some time now).

I think it will take me some little while to digest both the meals I've been having and the surfeit of information, thinking, research, ideas, conversations and more that I've been exposed to.

The session I attended just before lunch included 'faceted classification' of virtual worlds - enough to warm any librarian's heart, but even more interesting was information literacy guru SW who spoke about research into searching in SL and how SL information literacy compares with real world information literacy. If nothing else I had the chance to apologize to her for possibly being a bit tired and frustrated during the SL meeting of librarians which I attended (sort of) last week (too upset to blog about it).

Apparently this is my 501st post.

Yay!

And well done to all those of you who follow this. My thanks.

Utterly brilliant conference dinner.

Welcomed by a caricaturist who was great at capturing the people I watched her draw. At the risk of missing my starter (which didn't happen), I took my turn sitting for her.

At the meal itself a magician worked the tables and I have to admit I've never seen such sleight of hand. Very very skilled. And it helped that he picked on me so I could really watch him closely and yet still never see what he was up to - including stealing my watch.

So by the end of the (also excellent meal) the much anticipated after dinner speaker might almost have been an anti-climax. But TW was as fascinating as you might expect telling us about his five year imprisonment at the hands of terrorists.

Our workshop has gone well – around a dozen people attending. Some newbies and some more experienced. We divided them like that and three of us supported the newbies while one of us showed those who knew what they were doing various sites. I spent a lot of time helping complete newbie who struggled from logging on right the way through. I was also able to report on experiences such as getting motion sick and name drop the lovely building and underwater maze of TheOldPlace.

The keynote speaker C was, of course, brilliant. I’d expected that after reading his book on synthetic worlds and been looking forward to hearing him. But even better than expected with a marvellous (if speedy) tour through some of his thinking and observations, but finishing up with an uplifting look to the future and links to the spiritual value of what we’re doing. I wish we could just have him to hear all day.

Registration – went much as expected. Nice bag of ‘goodies’, conference proceedings on a 1 gig memory stick, nicely wrapped chocolate, badge with our Second Life avatar pictures on. A bit disappointing to be given a programme and find my name wasn’t on workshop – not exactly the end of the world. The programme itself was covered in images of delegate avatars; a very cute girl who of course turned out to be a presenter called Graham in real life; all of the three colleagues I was with – but somehow I’d been missed off that too! Ah well. Perhaps because my avatar is as boring as I’m in real life.
One nice thing in the bag was a handy notebook as the one thing I’ve forgotten is a notebook I can use with the Z-pen gadget the library has bought me to try out.

Attending a conferece tomorrow and Friday. Researching learning in virtual environments. Should be interesting.

Arrived at the conference safely enough. Just a ‘reception’ for the first evening before finding something to eat. But it went well and good to meet some of the delegates already – including a publisher who runs sessions in Latin in Second Life. One of the delegates was wearing some attractive pink fairy / butterfly wings. Why? It was obvious once I knew – because her avatar has wings in Second Life and that’s so much part of her character she thought she’d bring some with her. And why not. But weird seeing bits of Second Life creeping into the real world rather than vice versa.

My other blog is growing.

We now have official permission not only to do it in work time but to have 3 additional helpers - making 5 of us so it can go on if someone's sick and so on.

We met this afternoon to plan how we'd operate and it feels as though it's going to work well. But we'll see - now if only I could get help writing this blog! It's been hard to keep up these weeks while it has been so desperately busy. :-)

Very distressing morning.

Over to one of our big lecture theaters for the postponed mindmapping lecture to computing students this morning.

Five minutes before I realize the lecture that's in there doesn't look like it's wrapping up and worse yet there's no students waiting with me. I check two other large lecture theaters near me. No signs of life there. I walk across to another building and check a fourth. No luck there - and the pharmacy students I met weren't expecting mindmapping!

Eventually give up and return to the office fearing I'd made some dreadful mistake. But no - I've got the right date, time, location.

Later in the day the academic who asked me to do it emailed to say that the students were waiting elsewhere and he'd given me duff information. Ah well. It maybe the first time that's happened, but it possibly won't be the last. But I could live without it.

Concert last night was brilliant - very glad I went. Just a shame I wasn't tucked in bed till after 1 in the morning. Paying for it today.

Still, lots more students keeping me going today.

With work finished I then attended two screenings of _Hollywood Librarian_ which I'd long been looking forward to. Unlike last night's concert however, this wasn't as good as expected. It was kind of disappointing and difficult to see why. Movie clips, librarianship, a reasonably uplifting story - it should have been my cup of tea. But somehow it was very 'worthy' but not great. I watched it twice to check I hadn't missed anything - but really the highlight of the evening was going with former colleagues for a drink afterwards!

The student who was late last night did at least run me down to the ferry in his car - saved me a mile walk in the dark.

Supposed to have a mindmap lecture this morning but it's been moved to Friday.

But now I'm off for the afternoon to see a 74 year old in concert... not quite sure about how much I'm going to enjoy it. But it'll probably be better than I imagine.

Lots of student appointments today - one at 5:15pm which means staying later than I might have done otherwise. Still, every trying to be helpful I'll fit him in.

Coffee morning this morning from Dr R. I saw her last year give a talk at the chaplaincy and loved it so much persuaded our training coordinator to invite to do a repeat for the Library. And easily worth attending again.

She'd done a charity dog sled journey for five days in the Arctic and had a series of management tips she'd learned from managing her team of dogs. Beautiful photos, great stories, good tips and a 'moving' journey of her own and the others with her. Marvellous.

Working from home this afternoon - despite my fears it might be a 'distraction' with lots of things to do at home, I actually managed to get four times as much done as I would in the office thanks to there being no interruptions.

Q's funeral this afternoon.

Tremendous turnout from the Library - over 30 + some former members of staff. Standing room only in the chapel.

An odd little service but two great hyms I could sing by myself (it felt) in the back row. A moving poem that was apparently found pinned to his wall.

:-(

You may recall my irritation at having to see students in a 'workshop' last week before their lectures this week.

The first of the lectures was yesterday and went well enough.

The other two were this afternoon from 3-4 and then from 4-5. Interesting to compare them.

All computing students in their final year. One lot were doing 'study projects' and one lot doing 'engineering projects'. So the latter tend to produce more techy work. The first lot were lively and interactive and a pleasure to lecture to. The 2nd lot were the opposite. Now it could have been the time slots - who wants a lecture (particularly from the Library at 4pm on a Friday afternoon?) but they weren't *that* different. It could have been the lecture theaters. One was well lit and averagely raked; the other was dim and had a very shallow rake (so the students were a bit further away).

I keep trying to tell myself it was these environmental differences and nothing to do with the nature of the students who might do an 'engineering project'.