At IL in London, Brian Kelly told our audience:
“The room is wireless, open up your laptops and start blogging and IMing about our presentation…” He joked then that they should say only nice things! But — how cool was this? We’ve heard about conferences where virtual communities spring up during the proceedings of folks commiserating in chats, private chats and actively blogging or congrunting.
Is that happening here? I just read this at Library Stuff:
I?m sitting here in David King?s session. I see only four other laptops. One is a blogger. So, 20% of all the laptops in the room are bloggers. Again, the last time I checked, this was the INTERNET librarian conference. Just like the Computers in Libraries conference, I asked D. Scott Brandt, ?What do they call this conference again?? COMPUTERS in libraries. Oh well. Maybe attendees want to get away from their computers for a while. Maybe they don?t want to have to schlep their laptops around or have to possibility of having them stolen!
Stolen laptops aside, which is a horrible thing, I would hope that by next year we have many more folks taking notes and blogging and chatting during the meetings…
I stand by my advice: library administrators: BUY YOUR LIBRARIANS A LAPTOP…
Tech trainers: TEACH YOUR LIBRARIANS TO USE THEM!
Conference centers: OFFER FREE WIFI to ONE AND ALL — we’ll thank you for it by coming back again and again!