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I’m starting this report with a disclaimer: I arrived in Minneapolis to attend and present at MERLOT International Conference this weekend AFTER a long week of intensive learning in Cambridge. So, I am admitting up front to the fact that my brain was already on overload. Thus, my notes are much more brief than Lauren P.’s, so I recommend you move on to her report for thoroughness and insight.

I’ll restrict my comments general ones and will tell you all about our presentation. We talked about our initiative to provide blog and wiki services campus-wide. I provided an overview of the environment that made it a desirable and doable project. Lauren talked about the library’s role in supporting and growing the program by integrating instructional design and technology training for the faulty and other users. Kevin shared the details of the technology specifics of the implementation and on-going maintenance and support of this locally hosted open-source service. The presentation was very well received with lots of questions about how we made this into a viable program. One might think people were being polite (but I will say that both Lauren and Kevin were fantastic presenters), but we continued to have people come up for the rest of the afternoon and again today to say how they had really enjoyed our talk.

This conference is one that targets educators who incorporate technology to enhance learning in higher education. This year, a library tract was added, “Reinventing Libraries in the Digital Age”, which prompted us to submit a presentation proposal. I had attended a few years ago and had found it valuable but mostly as a way to see what faculty are doing with technology in the classroom. So it was a bonus that libraries were invited to be specifically addressed in our roles to support campus learning.

One session I’d like to report on was presented by Peter Juvinall from Illinois State University, who has used Facebook as the delivery framework in classes he teaches for freshman students. His anecdotal findings paralleled what we experienced in our pilot to use Facebook in LIB100 last spring. It was encouraging to hear that we may be on track with our goal to meet the students where they already are.

One other session I’d like to mention was a bit different. The presenter, Mike Buetner, spoke about the potential for video-based learning as a delivery method in a majority of situations. To make his point, he had the audience watch a video on how to tie a blood knot as we attempted to actually tie the rope. A few people were successful (I was way too brain-dead by the 5:30 session time yesterday to even attempt it). Here is an example of the type of video instruction he was promoting.

Finally, I have to tell about my new conference/class/meeting technology tool: the LiveScribe Pulse Smartpen! We weren’t allowed to use computers to take notes at the leadership institute, but one of the students had what looked like an expensive, but normal pen. It turns out it was really a computerized writing implement. It was so cool, when I got a few spare minutes yesterday, I rushed out to Target (Minneapolis is their headquarters city) and bought one. The technology uses a camera and custom paper with millions of microdots to capture every stroke and notation you make on the paper. You can download that onto your computer.The real fantastic part, though, is that the pen records every sound that is happening (read: presentation speaker or instructor teaching) and connects the audio to the image that was captured by the camera. All the captured material is time line based, so turning back to any page in your notes and tapping the pen on a word will restart your audio at the precise moment your wrote that word. I tested it out this morning at both the plenary session in a huge conference room and at a smaller session. The audio was clear and I was able to go back through my notes and hear exactly what was being said (helpful when I can’t read what I scrawled). I’m hoping it will become a useful tool for all the meetings I now seem to be attending.