This article is more than 5 years old.

David Weinberger Delivering Saturday’s Keynote Address

I learned very quickly yesterday that being a member of a conference planning committee means you are kept busy all day long and into the evening. I had volunteered to record all three keynote addresses, so I worked with Jason Griffrey, who handled the audio portion, to get my equipment all set up and going for Joan Lippincott’s opening keynote. Our new HDD camcorder worked beautifully (thank goodness). As a committee member, we each were assigned to do speaker introductions for the concurrent presentations. My first speaker was Heather Leary, from Utah State University who talked about their 9 year NSF funded project to develop “simple Internet-based tools to help school librarians and teachers better design and share classroom activities that use high-quality online learning resources, especially those housed in a digital libraries.” The site is called Instructional Architect.

I also helped organize two “lightning talk” sessions and I served as the wrangler (aka moderator, don’t ask me where the wrangler designation came from, probably having to get people on and off the stage in five minutes requires wrangling talents). The first of these was yesterday afternoon and the second took place this morning. Today, Erik gave one of the talks, and he presented about our entry into the Amazon cloud.

First thing this morning, I set up to record David Weinberger’s keynote on “Knowledge in the Age of Abundance.” He is a very good speaker offering up lots of ideas to make you think differently. It was fun to be able to chat briefly with him before his talk. The main idea he threw out today that caught my attention because it isn’t often a popular one when put in the context of student instruction was the idea of “good enough is good enough.” Good enough has different realities depending on what you are talking about. What’s “good enough” for advising a student on researching a term paper isn’t the same as “good enough” for a medical student studying brain surgery, of course. Often though, we take the position is that we always have to find the perfect resource for that undergraduate, when really, they just need enough “good enough” resources for their assignment. It is interesting to think how to adapt that idea but still do the right thing for our students.

This afternoon, I am introducing two more speakers so will report on those tomorrow. Thus far, the conference has been well run and well received. There are several vendors here who have supported this conference. The one that caught my attention is Boopsie.com. Their business is mobilizing your data and they offer subscription services to completely offer a library’s web services on a mobile devise. Since the theme of this conference is “Open and Mobile” we’ve been hearing about many great project to build a mobile presence, this vendor offers a way to do that (at a cost).