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I was very excited to attend and present at Lilly South in Greensboro this year. LillySouth is a teaching and learning conference for college faculty, staff, and instructors. It was one of those conferences I heard about over and over in library school (in my Instructional Design classes) and everyone always had great things to say about it. Like most conferences, there was a spectrum of presentations in topic and quality, but most of what I attended was very good. Some were more practical (you can do this as soon as you get back) and some were more theoretical (in the area of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning).

Like I’ve been doing, I took extensive notes that can be found in my blog. Links are at the bottom of this post.

The (much shorter and to the point) summary is here:

Lynn and Susan gave a great summary of the South Trip on Saturday morning. Several audience members expressed interest in both the course concept as well as the embedded librarians aspect.

Lynn presenting Susan presenting

My favorite quote of the whole conference was from Michael Dale of UNC-G in The Re-enchantment of Learning and Teaching: “Teaching is a public display of what I love.”

I attended a session on Flash animation. I was really interested in this because my MLIS practicum was in working with Susan and Kevin to create Flash games for teaching info lit concepts. The presentation showed we had a pretty typical experience: a 4 minute video took 40-100 hours of development time!

I also attended a FABULOUS plenary on developing an integrated course design based on Fink’s Taxonomy. Because of that session I totally rewrote how I plan to teach LIB100 in the fall. I’m very excited about implementing the new design. This was all based on Creating Significant Learning Experiences by L. Dee Fink, which we have in the building (and I won in a drawing, so it’ll be here if anyone wants to use it).

There was also an interesting session on short workshops. I attended it because of the toolkit project. This session was designed for Teaching and Learning Centers, but much of the content was useful for libraries, too. I think TLCs have a lot in common with libraries. We’re all there to support the institution’s mission, and we all have to get out there and really market our services for the campus to realize our value. The Brief Hybrid Workshops were shown as a way to get really important information to faculty, as well as a way to market full blown workshops. We could use it in a very similar way. To spare you here, more content on this is in the blog post on my blog.

Finally, Kaeley and I discussed Blended Learning in our LIB100 class.

One immediate action I’ve taken as a result of the conference was to set up a blog on instructional design and educational technology for library staff. Feel free to read along, leave comments, or not. If you’re interested in contributing, let me know and I’ll add you.

Good Conference! Lots of food for thought!