Having returned home after nearly a full week in busted/beloved Philly, I’ve had a bit of time to process ACRL 2011. Based on my three times attending, it’s as close to a model conference as one can get in terms of on-point collaborative utility. I’ve invariably come away with contacts and tech/teaching strategies that have implementation potential, and venues are always thoughtfully chosen (win/win on the Academy of Fine Arts reception). It is also clear that much care is taken with the selection of content, and it is welcome to experience frustration at the overlap of quality programming rather than underwhelm at its dearth.

situated co-learning

I was encouraged that so much of this year’s conference was solidly instruction and assessment focused, validating my sense that academic librarians are engaging with the pedagogical missions of their institutions in a responsive and culturally conscious manner, and often in ways that challenge the traditional information literacy paradigm. Among the sessions I found most useful were Carrie Donovan, Dunstan McNutt, and Anthony Pash’s Instruction Deconstruction: Perspectives on Critical Information Literacy, Megan Sitar, Michelle Ostrow, and Cindy Fisher’s Letting Go: Giving Up Control to Improve First-year Information Literacy Programs, and Megan Oakleaf, Michelle Millet, and Rachel Fleming-May’s Evolution or Revolution? Strategies for Demonstrating the Library’s Impact in a New World of Assessment (make sure to check the conference schedule proper for their handouts, etc.: all three sessions have them at the ready).

From my podium-clutching perspective, it felt like the invited paper I gave went very well: the audience was extremely participatory, which breathes life into any content one might attempt to share with a group of people confined to chairs. My message was one of self-reflection and engagement with the teaching and learning side of one’s librarian identity, and a greater recognition of the communities of practice that comprise our institutions and our unique ability to perceive and create connections between them.

There is a live screencast available via the ACRL conference site through April 2012, or you can view my slides:

The crux: by focusing on communities of practice, engaging in situated and participatory learning, cultivating instructional literacy, and seeking a “good enough” mentality (e.g., neither striving for unattainable perfection nor being unfairly critical of our own efforts in the classroom, etc.), skill-building occurs organically and makes the process of designing learning objects and experiences more flexible and effective.

librarian as indicator species

The community of practice concept was affirmed by the conference itself: there was striking synchronicity of ideas between almost every teaching/learning session I attended. In my own case, this was particularly true of Carrie Donovan’s characterization of critical information literacy as a means of developing a shared professional identity as library educators. She described the challenge succinctly: traditional information literacy has focused more on the what of instruction than the why or how: in my book and in the ACRL preso, I have tried to emphasize that, particularly for teaching librarians who have not necessarily been trained in instructional techniques and design, the acquisition of skills can and should be an ongoing process over the course of one’s teaching experience.

In my talk I described an analogy I often use to engage students to think about the broader context of librarianship: the librarian as indicator species. That is, as a group of individuals possessing qualities representative of a thriving intellectual democracy (intellectual and social freedom, information access, intrinsic motivation) that are among the first to be threatened in times of strife and scarcity (case in point: now). It has always been clear to me that librarians share a collective sense of purpose, and that in the current climate we are considering our value and how it translates in the midst of a relentless paradigm shift. My belief is that when we discover the most authentic way to situate within our environments (rather than simply “embed”, which has always evoked images of librarian-as-projectile), we are able to demonstrate the value of our species rather than assume or describe it.

reflective practice

Recently inspired by one of Kenley Neufeld‘s own presentation moves, in the final minutes of the talk I asked attendees to leave me evidence of their experience of the event: that is, to write a brief synopsis, suggestion, impression, or question that would help me understand the what had transpired and its impact. I received hundreds of comments, and reading through them has been equally productive and emotionally exhausting (as any teacher or presenter knows, evaluating personal feedback of this nature, however positive, takes serious backbone). The insights I received expressed collectively faced teaching difficulties (not to mention the fact that my slide text is way too small), and unexpectedly revealed a widespread concern with relevance, efficacy, and simple library survival.

When I speak at a venue like ACRL, my goal is to express my own convictions and commitment to librarianship in a way that encourages my peers to see the depth of value in what they do and to productively assert this in their own context. While I received many comments validating this goal, one was by far the most powerful, and is something I am tempted to bedazzle and frame for inspiration in those inevitable work-is-killing-my-soul moments:

Many thanks to whomever wrote this, for a) making me feel like the work I poured into this presentation was worthwhile, and b) encouraging me to always remember that there is value in acknowledging the most challenging aspects of our experience.

The power of our community of practice is that, whether in venues like ACRL or in the day-to-day of the workplace, when we engage with one another we are able to perceive ourselves in a different (and often vastly more sustainable) light.

Having successfully shifted from one end of California to the other and into (among other wonderful abodes) this unbelievably dreamy airstream office space, I can finally hammer the last rivets into the subject of this post: the invited paper I will be giving this Thursday at ACRL 2011: The Librarian as Situated Educator: Instructional Literacy and Participation in Communities of Practice.* Per usual there were twenty-nine directions I wanted to go with this talk, and as always I tried to keep down it to a manageable three (or less, god willing). In a nutshell:

Whereas librarians in higher education

1) are uniquely suited to facilitating academic growth through objective interpersonal and intellectual mentorship,

2) are unequivocally equipped to observe, understand, and reflect our academic communities,

3) and possess an unassailably strong conviction of our enduring purpose and value,

we can become situated educators, melding to our contexts, leading our efforts with instructional literacy, and engaging our constituents with critical inquiry.

These ideas have been percolating over years of library instruction and while researching and writing my recent book, Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning: Instructional Literacy for Library Educators. With luck my presentation will express the entirety of these convictions, in a heart-plus-brain-on-sleeve style. There is a podcast preview at ACRL Insider, if you’re so inclined.

root pitching

It’s always odd submitting a presentation proposal or description months or even a year before the fact, the point at which you need to lock in a subject that you know full well will flex by the date of delivery. In my experience, a title and summary pitch should consist half of what will signify interest and utility to a prospective audience, and half of tactical vagueness that should, when the time comes to actually do the work, remind me what I committed to speaking about while so specifically as to preclude inevitable adjustments. Because I tend to digress and run on and change things down to the last minute, at the root of it all should be an idea or conviction strong enough to withstand shifts in time and perspective.

My root for this particular talk is that librarians are de facto educators, teaching in the briefest moments and interactions. We help individuals discover their intrinsic motivation, feel confident in their own intellectual enthusiasm, and be honest about what they need and want to know, and why. We are academic confidants and counselors, and we are a persistent (and often vulnerable) aspect of a representative knowledge economy. We support the contents of people’s interrogative character and make no judgments about rightness, only feasibility. We understand our organizations, customizing our content to disciplinary and cultural needs, exposing connections, affordances, and efficiencies within complex systems that might otherwise remain hidden. It is this work that should be recognized as vital, and cultivated for what it is: essential, and unique.

channeling convictions

In general and despite the gnawing anxiety factor, I tend to enjoy teaching and presenting. One of the reasons is the singularly raw energy they create, which, if channeled productively, manifests in a strong and/or slightly bizarre delivery. When I present and/or teach it is typically on some aspect of librarianship, a craft for which I possess inordinate amounts of enthusiasm. When I communicate my thoughts on its more personal derivations (research, culture/context, technology, access, education), I have noticed that this admittedly begins to resemble something closer to possession. As in channeling, testifying, being caught by the spirit. Demons out.

Enthusiasm for something like librarianship or [insert 99% of all job titles here] can be difficult to explain to those external to its orbit: the range of rationales that call an individual to one profession or subject over another are vast. Once you are within a particular niche, much of the impetus drawing you towards its center becomes inscrutable to others. This is the same struggle that occurs in front of a live or virtual classroom: maintaining one’s motivation for a subject while attempting to engender enough of it in others to sustain their attention. The trick is, it is precisely the conviction that does the convincing.

My conviction in teaching and librarianship is rooted in a sense of rightness, a recognition that not only am I doing what I was set on this earth to do, but that this act is undeniably good. While there are plenty of other things I can imagine doing day in and day out, few feel as accurate, fitting, justifiable, and altruistic a match for me than librarian. I believe in what I do, and further the necessity of our existence is the core to our definition and redefinition and the locus of our contribution to society, individuals, and the learning collective.

situating library education

Which brings me back to the talk in question. I am exploring librarians’ educational impact on the academy and the researchers and learners who comprise it, and, how we can extend this impact by building our convictions in the form of instructional literacy. In the panoply of literacies, instructional literacy is an awareness of ourselves as teachers and the cultivation of the complex array of skills and convictions this implies. By cultivating these skills and applying them in communities we have taken measures to understand, librarians can become situated educators, that is, strategic, participatory, and engaged for greater pedagogical impact.

Be there or be square.

* Thursday the 31^st from 3:15 to 4:15 in the Marriott Liberty Ballroom.

Several years ago, after I started my position at Cal, I wrote an homage to Ohio University that outlined what I gained and learned during my time there. Thanks to my love of the place and the impressions it left on me, this was simultaneously one of the easiest and most difficult things I have ever written. I now find myself in a similar situation. Despite the anticipation of positive things to come, it is with a heavy heart that I write this farewell post to UC Berkeley.

In the course of my working life, I have found it impossible not to become attached to the professional surroundings I find myself in. The work we do shapes our lives day in and day out, and as we contribute to an organization we acclimate to its communities and collaborative networks and grow to appreciate them (if we are lucky). I have always had inordinately good luck, and it is this hybrid of personal and productive attachment that makes any institutional shift an emotional experience.

Later in the spring I will be starting a new job at the Claremont Colleges, a consortium of seven rigorous and beautiful liberal arts schools situated due south of Mt. Baldy in LA county. I’ll be their Instruction Services Manager/E-Learning Librarian, a newly created role at an organization that I believe will provide much opportunity for creative growth and skill building. It is a life move as well, bringing me much closer to the Southern Californian half of my heart (who I have been traversing most of this extremely long state to visit for far too long). Finally, I admit: the ocean beckons.

noscalgia

Working at a university like Berkeley has been a uniquely gratifying challenge. It has taught me volumes about librarianship and academia, most notably in the realms of pitch, advocacy, action, and accessibility. I leave a more skillful communicator and collaborator, confident in a form of organizational insight that can only come from learning to navigate a complex system. I have gained respect for workflows and channels of communication, and at the same time an awareness that it can take a bit of system hacking to achieve goals. While I am happily transitioning to an environment that returns me to my Reed College roots, I will miss the sensation of being a part of such a vast, public, and oft-conflicted concentration of talent and conviction.

Being sentimental in the extreme, the protracted goodbye to my brilliant students, faculty, and colleagues is already difficult. I will miss the relationships I have built with them, which I hope to cultivate indefinitely. Most heartbreaking is leaving my liaison role with the School of Information. Never have I met a more creative and dedicated cohort of individuals, and I will continue to appreciate their prescient window into the future of technology and culture, albeit from afar. This association and all that it has brought has arguably been the most gratifying experience of my career: keep up the amazing work, and best of luck to all of you (not that you need it).

clarevoyance

My love of organizational complexity and campus dynamics contributed to my decision to join the Claremont Colleges, which is a rare Oxford-style arrangement of small private institutions. Each maintains its own distinct personality, and what I have heard described as a “fiercely independent” academic/social culture. I imagine that this will make my combined job of coordinating instruction, outreach, and assessment approximately seven times more challenging (and seven times more interesting) than normal, not to mention upping the learning curve ante of a new job by a factorial degree.

A centralized library, Honnold-Mudd, serves all seven Claremont campuses, which consist of Pomona, Scripps, Harvey-Mudd, Claremont McKenna, Pitzer, the Claremont Graduate University, and the Keck Graduate Institute. Their combined enrollment of six thousand or so is smaller than any institution I have  worked for – Ohio University, the most relatively diminutive, had upwards of twenty thousand.

I’m happy to say that my impression of my future colleagues and the work to come is extremely positive; I have observed an attitude of excellence and dedication to students that is rarely matched, as well as strong senses of collective/individual identity (not to mention humor). I perceive a strategically shifting, agile environment in which much can be tried, tweaked, and tried again. Needless to say, I am fairly exploding with ideas.

More on the transition to come.

A confession: I am having an affair with the ocean.

It hasn’t always been this way, mind you. I was once actively against salt water. My marine indifference began in childhood, while inhabiting hotel rooms with post-Spring Break holes in the walls (also known as vacationing on the Texas Gulf coast). After the family drive from San Antonio, I remember putting on a suit and promptly burning myself raw in spite of my mother’s relentless sunscreening. And mistaking chunks of jellyfish on the sand for ice cubes. And fleeing rising clouds of mosquitoes. Also, realizing the implications of my cousins feeding alka seltzer to seagulls, watching bulldozers push mountains of seaweed, and marveling at exploded tar bubbles (which seriously predate the Horizon disaster) on the soles of my feet.

I have few memories of actual swimming on these trips, and these are similarly fraught. Through my trial by saline I maintained a love of water, but only its fresher incarnations. Mt. Hood snowmelt in Oregon summer, limestone creeks in Austin, and, in Ohio, a handmade lake on the women’s land trust down the road from my cabin, complete with floating dock and leeches (large and small, respectively). Nowadays, the Pacific is my poison. At Stinson I shred my knees on boulders, in the Bay I watch the grayscape, and at Swami’s I poke at anemones. Seaweed and dolphins are ever-present, high tides wash over the highway and pull huge slabs of cliff onto the beach. I go as early and as often as a day permits, freezing myself numb in unseasonable displays of bathing.

Despite this newfound adoration, I will never completely cease my sea fearing. Mostly because I know that I shouldn’t. The ocean, however beautiful, is not opposed to eating you alive, especially in winter and/or northern California.

I recently bought a wetsuit to avoid hypothermia and other dangers, which I have found transforms the experience of swimming. Instead of tossed around and bone-deep chilled, you are buoyant and impervious to cold. You are also one degree removed from the element in which you are immersed, unable to actually feel the water.

deep discursion

There is, of course, an analogy drowning in this aside. Regardless of what ocean you find yourself in, the thickness of your skin (whether born, borrowed, or bought) is a matter of no small importance. Consider, for example, engaging in public discourse academically or professionally. Airing ideas in a community of any kind is an exercise in calculated vulnerability, and one that invites equivalent measures of joy and jetsam. Like my younger self, it is more common to anticipate negativity at the outset of any unfamiliar venture, which can create either confidence or tough scars. With persistence and a series of subsequent chances, the latter can be transformed into insight about how deep to wade in the murk.

You should never become so assured that you forget to fear the element in which you are immersed: everyone else. The more you write, speak, or teach, the more you must learn to anticipate and respond to the opinions of others. An interlocutor empties the contents of their brain in order to achieve certain results, and while a majority will be supportive or justifiably challenging, a minority may be intentionally harsh. Both types of feedback must be dealt with, and this is where skin comes in (sometimes in the pound of flesh sense).

sea of snark

Consider two polar approaches to commentary: critique and snark. The former is the communication of an impression, the latter is negative personal digression. Critique is objective, snark is subjective. Critique can be challenging, but it moves the conversation forward, whereas snark stops it in its tracks even when embedded in an otherwise valid contribution.

A relatively tame example from my own experience, culled from feedback on a recent series of short talks on presentation skills:

Now, I would have loved to dialogue about how this short preso might better have hit home with this individual (and my door is always open, btw). Alas, anonymity. A colleague checked in with me with an offer of omitting the comment when posting publicly, which I appreciated and certainly would have done in their place. I admit that this was momentarily tempting in a face saving, I-hate-the-ocean-because-I-stepped-on-a-jellyfish sort of way. The thing about snark is, however unpleasant it might be, it is as unjustifiable to censor as any other type of expression. Same as the ocean, it is what it is. (Unlike the ocean, however, it is not particularly dangerous to turn your back on.)

In addition to small slights of subterfuge, social media shittalking and conference backstabchatter waxes and wanes as reliably as the tides. Suffice to say that every presentation I have ever given has had at least one attributable detractor, not counting those who raise tough questions or debate a point out of honest interest. These experiences have helped me build my own defenses, and from them I have learned an important lesson. Not only it is unwise to catch flying offal, throwing it back makes an irreconcilable mess.

collegiality without condition

Cattiness is semaphore for the intellectually insecure, a handy way to flail defensive intelligence. The existence of snark (or avoidance thereof) comes down to confidence: as in having it or not, letting its lack metastasize into arrogance, and/or being compelled to fill a vacuum by taking it from others.

It must be said that reality dictates practice even in the face of idealism. I once received a sound piece of advice when starting a job in academia, “here, it pays to have thick skin.” This is an accurate measure of the nature of many thought-focused professions. Some operants conflate snark with critique, and giving as good as they get becomes a point of pride.

I am, alternatively, a champion of decorum in discourse. The reason is simple: because it is the sensible way of doing things, as long as you are the type of person that uses scales like painful or pleasant, inane or smart, operable or busted to measure sense. Civility strengthens the thoughtpool, incivility weakens it.

As necessary as handling the odd negative jibe may be, thickening your skin can have a wetsuit effect: the more you are able to deflect, the more you reduce the rawness of engagement, which further risks hardening into callousness. A borrowed layer against the elements reduces the fear of becoming wounded, but you risk more as you feel less. Thinning your professional armor from time to time may hurt, but it also helps you reorient to sensations long since discarded and work toward a more unconditional collegiality.

The 2011 ALA Midwinter conference is coming up later this week, and I find myself performing the familiar preparatory motions of consolidating schedules, deleting spam, touching bases, and shuffling envelopes. Like other seasoned conference attendees, I do this to stave off the unpleasant deer-in-headlights sensation that occurs if you do not plan at least nominally, namely, not knowing a) where you’re supposed to be at any given moment, and b) what you’re supposed to do when (and if) you get there. Long before I learned this lesson, a prior Midwinter was my own inaugural professional conference. I now know that attending this event as a first was a somewhat questionable choice due to its laserlike focus on committee business (of which I had none), but it was still an important lesson in professional acclimation. At the time I was helped considerably by the ALA New Members Round Table – new attendees at this year’s Midwinter or Annual should definitely check out the NMRT site for events and tips.

Attending a conference in person is an oddly universal experience, crossing profession and purpose to produce a temporary, collective, self-defined social microcosm with its own quirks and conventions. I have been thinking about f2f conferencing not only because Midwinter looms, but thanks to a one-on-one interview I participated in with a UCB I School student toward the close of last semester. He was in the investigatory phase of a user-centered design project for an app or tool bent on improving the conference experience, and put a call out for subjects who had recently attended a professional event. I love recycling, so on the off chance that insights for hardened and newbie conference attendees may be embedded in the advice on circumventing pecking orders and analysis of Klingon culture, the transcript of our conversation follows. It is reprinted with permission, and edited lightly for clarity (I sometimes made questionable sense) as well as brevity (we went on for over an hour). Disclaimer: I did, however, preserve the sailor mouth.

Conference Interview: Char Booth, 12.13.2010

Have you been to any conferences or events recently?

I have. In late October, I attended the Internet Librarian Conference in Monterey. And before that, I went to a couple of conferences in the Spring, a couple of smaller ones, and then kind of a large one in summer: the American Library Association conference. So, a number of them in the past year.

The last one was the one in Monterey? The most recent one?

Yes. Internet Librarian…

How many people were there?

I think total attendees were just over a thousand… so pretty small. About a thousand.

If you say that’s a small conference, what is the typical size?

The conferences that I tend to attend in the library world are relatively huge. Some will have 15,000 plus attendees, and then the main annual conference of our professional organization can have upwards of 30,000. Very sizeable.

For the Internet Librarian conference, why did you go there?

To that one specifically, I was presenting, which is often one of the reasons why I go. If you present there, you get a break on the price. That’s not the only reason I went, obviously, but it helps with the costs. I don’t know whether I would have gone if I hadn’t been presenting. I could tell you the reasons why I might have…

Sure, go ahead.

It’s meant to showcase innovations in terms of IT and user services in libraries… programs that are developing, designs that are coming out, that’s the reason why I would go: to view best practices.

Apart from presenting your own talk, what were your goals when you went there?

This conference had a track about failures, like project failures, and also a user-centered development track. The failure track was new, I was speaking on the failure track, and I was really interested to hear the rest of it, just for information sharing and gleaning some more practical lessons that were learned. When you go to conferences, you don’t often hear about mistakes or workarounds. So it’s kind of like an anti-­model, or a fail camp type of thing where things get turned on their heads, and you talk about implementations that were unsuccessful. I was pretty stoked about that. To see evidence of agile development going on in libraries was very useful too. Also, to network in that way that happens, you have beers with people and you figure out: There’s mutual interest in research. That conference is pretty excellent on that end of things.

Why would you say is that? Why is this particular conference good for that?

It’s developed a culture of attendance… a very defined core of people go every year, which cuts down on the ingenuity of the topics perhaps, but it does make for some really useful networking. If you know that so-­and-­so is going, you might be more inclined to go and catch up with them. There are other library conferences with different foci. There’s this one in Spring that’s coming up where I’m speaking, ACRL, where the focus really tends to be on the sessions. Conferences often develop a certain personality or notoriety in one way or another. You go to one to view programs that are very rigorous and excellent, and you go to another to talk with mutually interested folks about articles that need to be written and projects that need to be created. The best conferences are half­way in between those things. A social design and a practical one.

What does social design look like?

Nowadays, it’s contained in a lot of the back chatter that’s happening pre-and post-­session. Where people are meeting, what people are thinking and doing…

Lots of interesting stuff in here that I need to keep apart in my head. I’ll ask about one thing specifically. You mentioned “back chatter”.

Yeah.

How would you describe that to someone that has never heard of it?

A lot of it happens on Twitter, a lot of it on Facebook… it’s often this collective decision making process where locations or events are named, themes are described and attached to locations, and then people follow information or decide what they’re going to do next, based both on the individuals that do the posting and on the location or the topic of the postings that are happening. That’s extraordinarily vague [laughs] but people generally describe the backchannel as commentary that underlies or floats over the formal aspects of a session. But to me it’s often also about: What’s happening next. We’re in the middle of this thing, but we’re already thinking about where we’re going to be next after this event ends. There are two modes of backchannel happening at the same time, which are often hard to distinguish during the conference. Some people are really focused on the commentary and the discussion that’s happening about a session, and then you have some of the same people in the room who are like, “Where are we going to meet up?” Half the people are there when something’s in progress, and half the people are not.

How does that affect the dynamic in the room?

I think it draws a lot of… it’s weird. It does two things: It makes half the people really metacognizant of how they’re hearing and processing the immediate information and reflecting it to others, and then the other half of the people, it draws them away from what’s going on in the room because they’re invested in the other backchannel. The outwardly focused one, that is. There’s an inwardly focused backchannel and an outwardly focused one. And participants within a session can be in either or both of those at the same time.

So the inward-­focused backchannel would be…

Directly commenting on the content that’s occurring, that’s related to a session or a presentation.

By using Twitter, Facebook…

Yeah, using the same methods, Twitter, Facebook. Or if the presenter is using a Friendfeed or something as a place to display comments… There’s that aspect of the backchannel, and then there’s all the rest: the snark stuff, the inside talk… Definitely, these are very different things. You used to have people who were live-­bloggers who very diligently contributing to the content-­focused “backchannel” before it was defined as such. And then you had people who are bored, perhaps, who were planning their next step but not necessarily communicating it publicly. Now, both are reflected in social media. As someone who has had backchannel displayed live in presentations: It’s really disconcerting when the latter creeps into the former. Someone uses a hashtag in your session that’s supposed to be content-specific and writes “Eff this crap preso, we’re going to Karaoke!”… that’s where it gets messy. I never really thought about that distinction in this way… but it’s real. And I’ve talked about ­blogging: People don’t liveblog from conferences as much as they used to because they have these other means of doing that. It mostly Twitter that fulfills this function, but in this respect the inward-focused backchannel can sometimes feel like grafting a long-­form commentary role onto Twitter that doesn’t suit it. During a session you sometimes have this flood of 50 identical comments that are all happening at the same time. If you have a tag for a specific event, you can at times just get a lot of redundant information. I think people are starting to tire of that kind of recycled… people just spitting things back.

That’s interesting. Is the commentary attributable? Obviously, people have their handles displayed to their commentary… but can you get a feel for who says what or is it just an undistinguished mass…?

I really think that depends on the scale and community behind the conference. Say you have keynote at a huge conference with a vast room of attendants. You’ve probably got a defined hashtag, a speaker that’s well known and you’ve got potentially thousands of people commenting at the same time. It’s going to be this really overwhelming flood of information from a bunch of folks who end up somewhat nameless. If you scale it down to a breakout session that’s much smaller, and you have people talking about their interactions within the session as it’s happening, you’ve got a lot more accountability. Those tweets are much less likely to be fleeting in nature, they’re going to last longer because their half-­life is defined by the size of the session, the size of the community contributing to the session. Those participants would have to be cognizant to the fact that the thoughts they contribute on the smaller event are probably much more likely to last longer, and to represent them as a participant in that community rather than one of five hundred who are like “Lee Rainie is smart.” I’m just thinking about the way that I’m using Twitter at conferences, and I’m really focusing on Twitter but it could be a lot of things. I’ve been going to these conferences for about 5 years, and social media has really drastically transformed the way things are being planned and talked about during the event. Not so much post-­event, it seems to just completely drop off. Aspects of the communication prior to and internal to these events are now very dependent on these two major social services for sure. Am I getting off the rails here? I lost my train of thought there at some point. Does that comment about scale make sense? Things are far more anonymous when they’re happening in a big room. I think people feel a lot safer snarking at giant events than at small ones because in the latter the presenter can look straight in their eyes… crowd effects create a big difference in terms of etiquette.

Let’s talk a little bit more about the difference that scale makes. How would you say does the scale of a conference influence the way people interact in the real world?

In face-­to-­face interactions? Can you unpack that a little for me? Do you mean the real world interactions that happen during the conference?

Yes. And the scale…

…in terms of the true organizational size of the event?

The number of attendees…

That has a lot to do with planning, the planning of the conference itself. Larger conferences are much more likely to be professionally planned and provide these “interaction farms’, bases where you can go… set-aside blandish locations where attendees are supposed to network that probably end up not used very often. So, if you’re in a large convention center, people are going to figure where they can get coffee, where they can eat. They’ll have these ways of escaping the conference almost. At smaller events, there might not be as much desire to escape. And the spaces that are provided by the conference to congregate are probably more accessible, more desirable to actually go to. Large conferences just tend to be faceless in a way. Just vast. These umbrellas of organizations or ideas… that aspect really forces participants to find their own points of mutual interest under this vast umbrella. At smaller conferences, people tend to know their points of mutual interest by virtue of simply being there, so they more easily get down to business. There’s less time for them to ping around in this giant space.

How do they get down to business? Or what’s the difference between that and pinging around?

This has so much to do with the nature of the conference or group. Is it informational, is it about project pitching and finding collaborators… how they’re getting down to business is entirely about the business they’re getting down to. Again, there’s a personality to a conference that defines how business is conducted. That personality is absolutely going to be affected by the nature of the sessions, is it an unconference… is the conference pretty determined, or is it determining itself? Because the latter is going to be profoundly different from the former. And how people actually make decisions… you’re talking about something really vague. Everyone in a given profession knows roughly what their conferences accomplish. They glean this knowledge through participation, and it takes them a while to figure it out. When I was starting out in Higher Ed, I was going to these conferences very intimidated, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I didn’t really have a place, I had no business to get down to, but now it’s five years on. I’m on committees, I have people to write with, I have mentors and mentees… My engagement in the purpose of the conference’s existence is what determines the work that I do, and where I do it. And my personal working style. It’s an extremely complicated question. And I really do think that you have to get down to the nature of the event and say: What is this? What’s the field? What’s the focus? How are these people… if they’re in Higher Ed, what’s their disciplinary focus? If they’re up there on stage, do they read papers that they’ve actually written, or do they do more I School-­style events, where ideas are being tossed around until something sticks? These are vastly different events.

How would you describe the process that you went through between the point where you went to a conference for the first time and you were intimidated, and now, where you’re in the zone?

The process that I went through to figure out how to deal with it?

Yeah. It sounds to me like you now know to navigate a conference better than you did before…

Yes. I think, if you compare it to one’s commute… maybe you move to a new location. You have this new job. You’re a new student at a school. You live in place A, and you have to get to place B. You have no idea how to do it. So you overplan. You research the route, you figure out where the bus is, you buy your crazy bus ticket, and it’s got too much money on it because you want to be doubly sure. You’ve got all your maps and all your crap, and you go and you do it your first time, and you get lost. It’s really frustrating. And you don’t recognize the neighborhoods, and you don’t know how to signal a stop. You arrive and think, “Oh god, that was totally awful! Everyone knew that I was this lost jackass…’ You do that once, and finally it’s done. Then you go home and do it in reverse. By the next time you try, the next day, you have this experience a little more down, you have one day under your belt. And you don’t have to do quite so much manic stuff anymore. You will find your way with a little bit more knowledge and a bit more confidence until it becomes rote and you can start to notice things along the way. Conferences are exactly the same way. The first time you go, it could be a specific event or just your first professional conference you’ve ever been to. You’re going to clutch at the program, you’re going to clutch at the crazy maps. You’re going to ask, “Where do I go, when do I go there? Who are my friends? Who are my enemies?” The third time you go you’re going to be like, “Ugh, I remember that one thing that I did last year. I’m never doing that again.” So, you develop knowledge that’s specific to the coordination of that conference. It’s like your memory of the event shepherds you through some of the protocol.

That’s exactly what happened to me. I know that I like this conference, so I’m going to go back. Or I know that I don’t like this conference and I’m not going to shell out on it again. But most importantly, I’ve found out how to navigate on my own – it’s like the peripherals are not that important, the path-finding documents, the conference planning documents. Now that I’m a more engaged professional, I know what I want to see. I don’t have to clutch at the program so closely to figure out who’s speaking… I know who’s speaking because I’ve heard about it or asked them or I know of specific projects that interest me or something. So I’ll hone in on these people rather than just having this experience of going cold and not knowing anything. I haven’t really thought about this, but that sensation of being lost and then finding your way, and then realizing that you could’ve taken this shortcut all the time. That’s the experience. If I was going to a new conference, it would be the exact same thing. I would have strategies that I would be employ to separate the wheat from the chaff, but I would still feel like a newbie… say, if I didn’t have a community or a sense of what the event was going to feel like.

You talked about one thing that I found interesting: You talked about that one thing that you were never going to do again. If you think about one thing that you did that you did not repeat the following year, what would that be?

Every conference is a singular experience, all of which have some things of greater and lesser value. I can think of any number of discussion groups or interest sections that were actually… let’s say… just not so much for me. The longer I do this, it’s like the more I just know what’s not going to be useful from my own perspective. I figured it out because I had some error in my trial along the way, like everyone else. But it is interesting in terms of social media that it’s sometimes harder to get a sense in the moment of what you should do. Just thinking about the backchannel aspect, some people are kindof huckstering their sessions. I mean, I do it. I might tweet, “Come see me talk about this amazing thing’… and maybe you’ll think it was the opposite of amazing.

On the level of these things, apart from making bad decisions about content, were there any breaches of social protocol? Is that possible? Can that happen to you if you’re new at a conference?

You mean, did I transgress… …some invisible boundary? Oh, that’s a good question, let me think about this. I can’t… I’m sure there’s something. I’m trying to think of all the times I’ve embarrassed myself… I think that it’s more internal trepidation than external faux pas. Any organized system comprises of people who are either new or middling or seasoned. And they’re all in a group focused on a similar topic or members of the same organization. There’s a process of people on the periphery being drawn into the center. And along the way, they’re going to be nervous about making missteps, and not knowing what to do, and flouting the protocol, or not having the right ticket to get in somewhere. Trying to get into the fanciest event for all the VIPs, and being all “Can I come in?’ Embarrassing yourself because you don’t understand the significance of certain things. I think that is a real risk, but it’s also like being a teenager and saying, “Ohmigod, everyone just saw me fall on my ass.” But the thing is, in reality: no one cares, no one saw you. You’re nervous about your own performance, but no one else knows who you are and they all feel the same way anyway. I think that’s a real thing at conferences, if you’re new you have to find your way, and you probably will not get something that you’re supposed to get. But half of that will come from not understanding an organization or the people at an event that direct it, that have more pull. At a given event, for example, you will have people in attendance that might catalyze more action. And if you’re new, you may not know who these people are. The next year you probably will. Some people operate more efficiently or more charismatically in spaces like conferences, and they will draw more attention to themselves and get more of whatever widget that they wanted to get out of the event.

The people who act like that, with more…

…moxy? [laughs]

…is that related to what you said earlier about periphery vs. center?

Yes. I think that people who fancy themselves at the center of events do tend to present themselves as though they possess a cachet of sorts. That could be people who have been invited to speak or to direct things or who organize the conference, so depending on what type of event it is, there are always going to be the “important” ones. At any event – we all know that this is true – people will become interested and engaged in things when the luminaries speak. Think about TED. You have 40 super-­geniuses who get to bark at the audience in their brilliant way, and the audience doesn’t get to say anything. It’s all recorded up until the point where people start asking questions, and the camera cuts off. Everyone knows who’s important at TED. The people in the audience might feel important because they’ve been invited, but the truly important thing about TED is the people on the stage. It’s organized to be regurgitated digitally – which is awesome – because you get these amazing recyclable speeches, and really excellent visual presentations. There may be networking going on, but the people who are speaking are getting tons of kudos, and massive opportunities as a result of it. So it is not a conference at which work is necessarily supposed to happen, as far as I see. It’s a media event. But even at your… ComiCon, say, there’s certain people everyone wants to talk to at ComiCon. It could be Dr. Spock, it could be the person who knows the most Klingon or whatever, but there are going to be heroes. At every single conference, no matter how odd or pointless it seems from the outside. And in small, defined communities like that, it’s not long before you discern the pecking order. When you’re new, someone might even point it out to you: “There’s the head Klingon, that’s the badass.” So now you know who you’re supposed to be worshipping.

Who’s the head Klingon at the Internet Librarian conference?

… do you want names? [laughs] There’s a lot of head Klingons, I suppose. People who speak every year. They’ll be people who have published books or who have had some kind of media notoriety, same as any conference or in any profession. The people who are head Klingons tend to know that they’re head Klingons. And they typically do things because they enjoy being head Klingons, which is all well and good, I suppose. And there’s also a bunch of people trying to get to that place or being put in that place, because that’s the nature of Klingon society. At professional conferences, if you’re presenting, it’s a mark of success, right? You’re sometimes doing it to showcase your own work, sometimes to get ahead in your profession… none of this is a secret, and I think conferences are organized to help people become better Klingons. To learn and to speak.

Have you had experiences with trying to get a minute of attention from these people?

Mm, yes, early in my career, when I was younger and I hadn’t discovered my interests in any particular research (which I’ve done now, which is great), but I used to be like “Hi, my name’s [interviewee’s name], care to dispense some advice?” [laughs] And they were just like “Who are you, freak?” Just kidding, librarians are really nice. But when you’re new at something you sometimes have to put yourself out there in a way that feels dangerous. Maybe that’s a faux pas. But I suppose I would crash receptions and just walk up to the president of some giant thing and say “Hi, I have this idea.” I suppose it usually didn’t get me very far, but a couple of times it did. Being confident as well as brave about ignoring the pecking order is a good strategy sometimes – if you can pull it off.

What does it take to “pull it off”?

Communication skills, humility, good ideas. What it takes to pull anything off [laughs]. The thing to remember is that focus isn’t necessarily on you at a professional event, unless you direct it to yourself or you’ve been asked to perform – like if you’ve been invited versus being allowed to pitch your paper, pitch your project, pitch your topic. Yet another pecking order, all conferences seem to have them, save unconferences. Have you been invited to speak or have you asked them to give you the floor for a while? … which would mean submitting a paper, a presentation, a proposal or whatever.

And being invited would be keynote speaker?

Yeah, something like that. You’ll notice that on people’s resumes, they’ll be like “presented x y z (invited).’ That’s a mark of status, that’s a normative vitae-­speak mark of status I’ve noticed. Especially in academia.

If you think back to Monterey, what was the most valuable interaction you’ve had?

Honestly? A conversation that I had with an old mentor of mine, in which I got to vent some frustration – it was a mutual frustration venting conversation. This is a mentor of mine that I’ve known for years, who was totally someone that I did that bothering-­the-big-­wig thing to, but then ended up maintaining a wonderful relationship with her for years. So this is a professional mentor that I’ve learned a lot from. She and I took a thirty-minute walk and just talked, some about life, some about work. Talking about project frustrations, what we were doing to get around them. Hacking our issues, it was that kind of talk. Invariably, that’s the talk that’s great. Or, when I find someone new to collaborate with, those are always really validating. For me, when I hear someone speak, and I have an idea to blog about it, or talk to them about contributing – I’m on the publication committees of one of our professional presses – if I see someone that I think should write a book or should know that they’re doing good work, I go get them. Rrrrr, like that. Those are great. Half of the reason I go to conferences is to have these individual interactions, typically.

How do you get them to talk to you?

It’s usually acquaintances. People you’re making plans with. But, oh, you mean in the other case. If someone has made a presentation that I thought was interesting, and I want to approach them, I walk right up to them and say: “I thought what you said was excellent. I represent bla-­bla-­bla, would you consider submitting a proposal?” Or: “Do you mind if I write a blog post about that? Do you want to say a few words?” You get straight to the point because there are other people who want their time. It’s like frontal assault. You need to be able to represent a cause for that. If I was young in my career, or now if I didn’t have anything specific to write for or about, I could say: “That was great, I learned a lot from you.” But I wouldn’t say: “Write a book for my press.” Now I probably stress the presenter out by saying that, but I’d likely also flatter them in a different way than someone walking up to them and saying: “That was great, I learned a lot.” This is another thing that happens at conferences. You have your Klingons on the one hand and you have your… sycophants, I guess, on the other. [laughs] I’d love to see TED on the sycophant end, that’d be amazing. Like, what happens when presenters walk off that stage? People tear them limb from limb, there’s parts flying everywhere.

It almost sounds like if you’re on the sycophant end of things, you need to have something to throw in, something to wager with.

Yeah, a leg. [laughs] Kidding. But really, sycophant sounds very negative, it’s almost pejorative and that’s not the way I mean it at all. The ones on the periphery working their way inside. But yes, I would say so. Or you need to be seeking those who can help you figure out what you can wager with. So you might want to ally yourself with people that you’d like to emulate, or you want to collaborate with because you respect them, or that you think can help your career. This is the natural course of mentorship and collaboration. A caveat here, I’m describing the events I have participated in, which all tend to be about technology and higher education, technology and libraries, libraries and libraries, higher education and pedagogy etcetera. I don’t know what an engineering conference is like. I don’t know what a Romance Authors’ conference is like, but they probably have similar attributes. And one of those attributes is: the ingénues want to become the experts. I don’t remember why I started talking about this. What did you ask me last?

Specifically, whether the sycophants – for lack of a friendlier term – need to have something to wager with.

This really does get down to your professional goals. If it’s the idea-­pitching conference, you wager with your idea. If it’s a giant professional conference that’s there to sustain its own mothership and its members, it’s going to have to find defined channels through which participate. So you can join a committee. You can organize an event. You can create a poster, which is the entry-­level I think at every conference. And once you get that under your belt, you can be on a committee and eventually chair it. Or you can submit a paper. There’s levels of participation that shepherd people into organizations, that give them opportunities to do something that’s low ­commitment, then a subsequent opportunity to do something that’s higher commitment. [Inaudible] It totally gets down to: How strategic are you? Are you interested in making a legitimate, useful contribution, and how are you going to express that to people with whom you think you can do that? There’s so much networking happening at conferences, and that’s what’s behind it: Can you identify and express your contribution, and can you find individuals with whom to ally? Or, are you there on an idea-gleaning mission to take back to your own institution?

Let’s talk a little bit more about the former since that seems like it would happen a lot. At a conference that is as vast as, say, the ALA conference, or anything on that order of magnitude, how do you even identify the people that you want to ally with?

Through the committees and working groups within the organization. EDUCAUSE for example has EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, they have all these different, smaller substructures and subgroups that, even by virtue of their title, you gravitate towards because it has something to do with your job or with your professional interest. So the nomenclature within the organization helps you navigate that. If you are not yet in that organization, you look at the giant breakdown that the organization represents, and you say: That’s the thing that I do, so I’m going to go over and check that out. And you feel out which one fits. I think that’s really the way it works. These things are organized so that each arm can represent itself. The tiny actors within the giant arm are figuring out speakers to have, figuring out discussion groups to create or whatever, smaller sessions… They know what the larger arm works towards, and so they’re trying to represent it. Everyone has this mission/vision thing going on. They might be trying to direct it in a new way, say, if you’re on this subgroup that you think has gone astray, you could think, “I need to turn this battleship!” You’ve got some people in there working toward change. And new people are often looking for these change opportunities, right? That might be something that people either consciously or unconsciously do: identify places where they can have an impact within a huge organization or event.

If you, for a moment, forget about everything that we’ve talked about so far…

… I already have, I have such a bad memory [laughs]…

Excellent! What would you say is the hardest thing about attending a conference?

Not getting fatigued. Figuring out how to strategically manage your time so you’re not ending up burnt out or in all not-so-great sessions. The hardest thing about attending a conference is developing a viable strategy so that you identify the most useful points of interest for you. Speakers, events, locations, afterhours things, places to get free swag… whatever. Basically, a way of reliably mapping your own experience to that event, because often, conference planners do not provide you with a tool. There might be some kind of application that they might have contracted with or developed to try to help you figure out what is happening when, create a little schedule for yourself… but in my experience, those things are just dismal.

What makes them bad?

They’re stand-­alone, right? So they don’t connect to all the things that are actually happening. They don’t have anything to do with a lot of the things that people really want to do. They’re like: All the sessions, all the formal things. They’re just about that. I don’t think anyone has ever figured out a way to represent the backchannel in the form of planning tools. And maybe it’s not even a good idea. But I do know that either I feel like I don’t know the good things that are going on because I looked away for two seconds and I lost the thread… say you’ve got a four-­day conference and it’s totally brutal, and you just want to take a break, so you check out for two hours, and you feel like you’ve lost your community for a minute. You’ve lost the threads, the hashtags, you don’t know what’s going on next. [...] How do you keep a bead on the path that you want to follow, the trajectory that will lead you in a good direction rather than off the rails?

It sounds like the after-­hours stuff is what makes a lot of the conference worthwhile, and that’s something that the event facilitator doesn’t address at all. How do you navigate that space then?

Well you know, sometimes after-­hours stuff is very much facilitated by actors within the event. So even if the über-­organizer can’t be worrying about that kind of stuff, the actors within the organization that are savvy about how things get done are organizing events that people want to go to: some random meetup, some kooky thing that’s happening. They know how to get people together. Or, just small groups of people are getting together in their hotel, or something. It’s rarely the stilted, organized receptions that I consider truly productive. Anything where you don’t feel like you’re about to drop your plate… like, when you’re holding your cell phone in one hand, and this stupid little plate with cauliflower or something on it in the other, and your napkin’s all wadded up, anything that’s relaxed and doesn’t have this problem going on, that’s what people really want to go to.

You mentioned carrying a cell phone, and that it’s sometimes not very useful. What other kinds of technology do you take to a conference?

I always take a laptop, I always take my magic phone, and I’m fixing to buy an iPad so that I don’t always have to lug the laptop around. I don’t think that I would be very stoked about a small computer like the Air, but perhaps the iPad would bridge the gap if I can get 3G. So that’s going to be my next strategy. Pretty much ubiquitous – laptop and smartphone. And if I have to present: Do I have my adapter cables, do I have all that stuff, charger, external devices? Do I have it backed up in three different places plus Dropbox? Going to a conference as a presenter is a very different experience than just going as an attendee. It’s completely different. Because you have to be doing the huckstering, and the preparation, and the stressing out, and the technology planning, and then it’s over. And then you just want to go to sleep.

If you’re not presenting, how do you use the technology that you carry?

To make notes to myself, to network with people, to work on other work – always, eternally. That’s one of the problems about conferences, that you’re also trying to get things done while you’re there. Because it’s not like the world stops or your job ends when you’re there. It’s remote office as much as chronicling one’s experience during the event, while participating in social media, working while you are tweeting something or posting pictures on Facebook. That’s what you’re using technology for: Engaging with the event and supplementing your own work needs outside of it.

Maybe one last philosophical thing: If you think about academic or professional conferences, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

Honestly? The exhibits hall. The giant hall with all the products, with people in nice suits trying to grab you and make you buy something. It’s like a carnival with no fun prizes. The only fun prize they have is a bowl of candy, and I don’t even eat candy. So the first thing I think of is that room, which I tend to avoid. Other people love the room, they go in with their bags and fill them up with free stuff that they actually need and use in their libraries. But that’s what I think of first. And maybe then the stress of the huge program, trying to figure out what not to do. And then, I think about the people that I’ll be able to interact with and that I want to meet. But the first thing is this stress thing, and then how to navigate it.

When the drafting is done, there are two sides to any publication: effort and output. Effort is what it takes to get something written, output is what is (eventually) suitable to be read. These rarely resemble one another as much as an author might hope, and the former always takes a greater than expected physiological and psychological toll. After effort is thus expended, it is next to impossible to objectively separate output from ugly.

Enter the necessary violence of editing. Output achieves readability not only through one’s own revisions, but by handing the raw results of effort over to someone (or someones, preferably) for purposes of critical dissection. Not only does every output-bound composition sift carnage onto the cutting room floor, each is followed by a trail of collateral damage proportional to the energy it took to produce. The greater the effort involved in a draft, the more its unnecessary elements are encouraged to proliferate, and the more crucial (and uncomfortable) this operation becomes.

bargain debasement

Being edited is not unlike striking a bargain: it requires a balance of strategy, realism, and self advocacy. That said, effort creates blinders that mask, from an author’s perspective, product flaws obvious to anyone else. Irrational attachment or inability to acknowledge these problematic elements are what makes the negotiation so often difficult. Despite an irresistible (albeit sometimes fair) urge on an author’s part to overvalue damaged goods, this emotional deathgrip is almost exclusively broken by critical editorial distance.

One certainty in the editing process is that much of what a writer thinks is essential is sure to strike any reader as superfluous. The challenge for an author becomes to identify those who are able and willing to provide actionable perspectives on their effort (or to try and accept those who have been assigned to do so) and then to discern what to incorporate or reject during the outputting. This is made more difficult by the personal relationships that simultaneously facilitate and complicate productive critique, and the night/day variations between any two editorial perspectives. Triangulating these into a substantive revision is, for lack of a more pleasant metaphor, like picking a scab: painful and perversely satisfying.

collateral detritus

Under skillful editing, effort’s qualitative detritus – from exhaustion to backaches to redundancy to self-doubt – is (and arguably should be) rendered almost invisible in output. A reader might tacitly experience if not wholly perceive a writer’s victory in publication, but as a result they rarely appreciate effort’s wake (particularly when output is received as mediocre). What scant formal evidence exists can be found in dedications and acknowledgments, where, particularly in scholarly and professional writing, the dispassionate objectivity veil is lifted so that abject apologies can vie with heartfelt thanks before being shoved aside by tables of contents.

For the comfortably literate, there are few imbalances as discomfiting as the ease of reading and the insane difficulty of writing. There is an inverse gulf between creating and consuming output: the more effortlessly a line of text is read, the more effort it took to create. Paradoxically, effort exists independent of quality: output can be panned or praised, but the labor that produced it is functionally indistinguishable. After running the publishing gauntlet several times, I flinch with post-traumatic empathy when I hear someone offhandedly criticize a random book or essay. Through an author’s ears, praise and critique pass back over the effort minefield before registering, usually somewhat worse for the mental wear.

defect dependent

Many glaring compositional issues result from a writer’s inability to accept that so much of their effort remains unknown to the reader. This creates the aforementioned struggle to release problematic habits, no matter how persistent. My own most prominent defect is simple: I run on. I have difficulty not only getting to a point, but keeping said point singular. Whether by uprooting unnecessary adverbs, reconciling redundant clauses, or purging purposeless adjectives, I end up eradicating a third to half of what I have written, and that is before passing along a draft.

Despite my awareness of this problem, I remain neurotically attached to my own effort and incapable of literal deletion. If you share this affliction, one strategy to reduce your and your editors’ discomfort is to keep a compositional b-side as you write. My own cutbits* are always lurking in the background, as an end matter area or secondary document where I packrat eradicated thoughts and text chunks related to any current project. Reading over these fragments is like listening to rough outtakes that never made it into a demo, and time and again I stumble across an idea or turn of phrase well worth recycling.

As humbling as it might be, this approach neatly reduces my risk of covering excessive ground while also reducing my fear of squandering labor. Cutbitting is one of many cathartic methods of making more use of effort. In my next post, I will explore how digital/social composition can be used to expose output’s underbelly and create a supportive community of toilers (in other words, what I am doing right now.)

If you missed it on the first go around, you can also read my first post in this series.

- – -

*cutbits

for being so long preoccupied

not to say that all of their output beyond and around said defect is perfect, by any means, but the one issue that dogs them as they go about the process of revising, editing, revising, and editing again.

in the way they output the effort

A good writer comes across as a siren song, making one of the more difficult, halting, and personal forms of production appear relatively effortless.

it is easy to read once once has learned to do so; writing does not carry the same charactieristic.

becoming more familiar, more process-oriented.

an author learns more about
writing self and builds skill of expression. that said, i would like to find one individual for whom writing actually is a second
nature. for most of us it is more like voluntary natural selection.

It is no surprise that the more effortless a piece of writing appears on its surface the more tortured was in its life
cycle,

playing out in a context much more darwinian than disney.

As much as I wish more layers of the effort process were evident in
final composition, authorship in digital realms such as blogging and so forth achieves this to some degree – it exposes more beta

In a car, the output of the engineering can constantly be are more exposed: you can open the hood and examine what went into its production; whereas in a printed composition the more bolts are exposed the less likely it is to turn over. Not so with the layers behind creative and/or literary output.

consisting of gradual change.

Whether it is creative or utilitarian, all design
involves

Some time ago I posted about a battle I was having with writer’s block, which generated excellent forge-ahead advice from fellow toilers. Since eliminating the source of that obstruction, I have found myself in editorial purgatory: the anticlimactic and seemingly endless process of back/forthing that eventually (god willing) results in a finished product. After a long spell of distance from the-book-that-yet-remains-intangible, I recently turned in my page proofs, the final step in the long slow road to publication.

disastral projection

In my experience, looking over a final, formatted copy of anything before giving it the green light is two parts relief to one part nausea. This time was no different: gratitude that this small slice of hellven is finally off my cerebral plate, mixed with a mild horror at experiencing my own writing in a next-to-irrevocable form. It’s not that I’m not proud of the project, exactly: after so much time honing and revising, it’s the unchangeability that causes discomfort. That, and the out-of-body sensation of anticipating the hypothetical reader’s experience of the formatted whole. During planning and writing, this kind of intentional dissociation is an excellent way to maintain clarity of prose and purpose. After all is said and done, however, it becomes an agonizing exercise in self second-guessing.

Any product born of grueling personal effort and intended for consumption by others, whether an expectation-laden holiday dinner or a full-length monograph, can be hard for its creator to stomach. For the more perfectionist among us, the reasons are familiar: you never stop wanting to arrange the vestigial dessert forks. Unfortunately, the harder you strive for gastronomic or compositional perfection, the more likely you are to see only post-plating flaws. And, as my amazing late matriarch of a grandmother could have told you: the bigger the spread, the less chance you have of ever sitting down to eat.

edit, or abort?

Writing a book is as subject to extremes as culinary machinations of a similar scale: overdoing it results either in tryptophanic stupor or emotional breakdown. There are, of course, aspects of each undertaking that anyone engaged in pulling them off can actually enjoy – why else would they ever get done? Whether I am hovering over a keyboard or a cutting board, like most I am very much predisposed toward the getting started end of things: Imagining, researching, prepping, and producing are the easy part, and what follows, when the real work begins, is when I start to resent the fact that food/words exist.

In order to cure this heartburn, I am compelled to reflect on what it is about writing that I find most difficult: basically everything that comes after a first draft, which I find roughly as diverting as discovering the gizzard and giblets bag under a soggy dishtowel after cleaning up a mountain of soiled dishes. This is the first of a series of several posts that will (I hope) help me reconcile myself with the editing process, which, however painful, is what makes things worth reading.

Stay tuned.

I’ve recently experienced another first as a librarian: writing letters of recommendation for two of the brightest students I have had the pleasure to interact with. I’m happy (but not particularly surprised) to say that the process is having a palpable this-makes-all-the-hard-work-worthwhile effect, and for two important reasons. Not only does it offer me the chance to sing the praises of the sharpest/most deserving in a way so pleasantly motivated as to feel effortless compared to less immediately validating types of output, it’s helping me consider the often untapped potential of personal advocacy in the work that librarians in higher education (or anywhere else, for that matter) engage in.

We are advocates by trade and nature: fair use, intellectual freedom, equitable access to information and public space (and, of course, no, you absolutely cannot ban that book, thank you very much) are all integral components of our professional milieu. This familiar big-A library Advocacy agenda may eclipse, but should by no means diminish, the other, small-a side of the advocacy coin. While being invested in the personal and intellectual progress of those we support is a natural orientation for many of us, our capacity to become their big-C Champions in a more formalized sense often goes under recognized. In my estimation, building ongoing, meaningful mentor relationships with students/researchers (and to design instructional, reference, and outreach programs that support this goal) is a widely nascent opportunity on both individual and organizational levels.

Public-facing librarians tend to encounter (thousands of) individuals at each extreme of the learning spectrum: those at their most clueless, and those at their most focused (often one in the same). Each extreme offers a perfect vantage point for observing and supporting individual growth.  Beyond being the basis for a fabulous pedagogical and service orientation, approaching every interaction as though it had the capacity to culminate in a letter of recommendation years down the line accomplishes a number of practical tasks. So much of our consultative strength is in interpersonal guided inquiry: honing a vague research notion into a tacklable project, suggesting alternative strategies and workshopping half-based ideas while giving much-needed moxie (aka positive reinforcement) along the way. The ability we cultivate to discuss ideas outside of our immediate expertise, to understand the ever-increasing interplay between disciplines, and, perhaps most powerfully, our capacity to be genuinely interested in basically anything, have  no equivalent in higher education and should be recognized as among our most tangible and transferable assets. Beyond that, the trained sensitivity of those reference-oriented among us make us naturally effective and inclined to triage and mitigate hesitation, uncertainty, apathy, and information struggle on numerous levels.

While these abilities are often demonstrated in larger learning interactions, I find that they have the most impact in one-on-one settings, which, if properly supportive, can help a student or patron become comfortable at admitting their intellectual vulnerabilities in ways that traditional learning scenarios might not allow. Classes are bursting at the seams, faculty are hard-pressed to find the time to support each student to the full extent of their research needs, and learners are often naturally reticent to divulge (albeit explore) the extent of the academic challenges they face. Formal education is a process rife with insecurities and competition for the attention of those who can advocate on one’s behalf, particularly in large-enrollment situations. Librarians are poised, as semi-neutral actors in an academic organization, to provide another line of insight and support that is functionally external to the source of the pressure – we can act as semi-detached generalist strategists, providing advice into the skill set necessary to succeed in professional and academic areas that we tend understand better than we might give ourselves credit for.

A common complaint is that our advice and lessons fall on deaf ears, but an equally common observation is that there always seems to be one student out of twenty, fifty, or a hundred who is paying full attention, whether they do so out of a low opinion of their own abilities or a clear sense of academic purpose. Another common complaint is that we are rarely able see the end results of our efforts: this type of enduring service approach provides a curative for productive detachment. It is critical for us to nurture the connections we forge with our students when they occur, and guide them towards whatever actionable ends they might facilitate. This is another powerful deliverable of the growing number of programs at Drexel University and elsewhere that seek to facilitate interpersonal relationships between students and librarians, an opportunity also afforded by teaching and liaison responsibilities – I met one of my recommendees at a Research Advisory Service appointment in my first semester here, and another in a Master’s seminar paper consultation in the I School.

Being prepared to make a recommendation, be it an application, scholarship, award, etc., requires insight and enthusiasm both for the individual in question and your own ability to advocate on their behalf. Knowing an individual well enough to champion them takes persistence – following up, requesting copies of finished papers or assignments, and most of all giving them the sense that you are invested in their progress. When I meet students with whom I develop a particularly strong connection, who are interested in throwing ideas around and finding their own path through disciplines and theories that are beginning to interest them, I do my best to encourage them to recognize the extent of their interests and abilities in order to overcome the most common hurdle I observe: the feeling that their voice is not worth contributing to the conversation (which is, ironically, often the same voice librarians need to confront). I try to offer them genuine and enthusiastic support, remembering how significant this was and still is to me in the course of my thought-engaged life. I take pains to imagine ways to suggest how they might take their efforts further than they expected of themselves, be this publishing a paper, pursuing a grant or fellowship, and so on. More than anything, I try to approach those who approach me lockstep, and, when I feel that I am truly able to make a solid and convincing case for someone, I offer myself as an advocate they can call on, if need be.

I came into the office this morning dragging a long mental to-do list, only to find internet access down in most buildings on campus. This being a large (albeit temporary) productivity barrier for the average e-learning librarian, I searched myself and realized that the only thing I’ve been meaning to do that doesn’t require connectivity is, fittingly, write this blog post on technology failure.

I’ve apparently lingered on snafus many times in the past, including in the July 2010 issue of Library Technology Reports, which examined predictions and experiments with VoIP and web video from the oft-maligned library 2.0 era (predictably few of which turned out quite as expected). Less-than-success has also been occupying my mind in a preparatory capacity: Internet Librarian is later this month and has an entire track devoted to risk, innovation, and failure, spearheaded by the incomparable Sarah Houghton-Jan. I’ll be joining the Failcamp panel from 1:30-2:30 on Tuesday the 26th with three of my other favorites: Amy Buckland, Jan Dawson, and Krista Godfrey, to talk in an entirely lo-fi and highly interactive way about the inevitable trial and error of innovation.

I find that in general there is no better way to understand oneself and one’s capacity to deal (or one’s organization and its capacity to thrive) than by looking hard at how you/it create and/or mitigate projects, tools, etc. that, for one reason or another, end up whimpering instead of banging. S.o.l.-seeking can go far beyond this practical tendency toward slightly masochistic self-examination, however. True failsafing requires, in part, a nuanced understanding of the many shades of technology crap-out that exist. To name a few:

a) Actual, honest to god system failures, crashes, etc., such as the web blackout I am experiencing as I write this.

b) “Failures” that are in actuality evidence of critical de-bugging in pilots, experiments, and trial runs, which any project manager knows like the (shards of glass embedded in the) back of their hand.

c) The ubiquitous, inevitable user fails that accompany our interactions with every gadget, service, and app under the sun.

Let me linger a while on c). In social media and externals of any kind, five times out of ten this type of fail is likely to be caused the inevitable misunderstanding that comes from a proliferation of unfamiliar settings/functionality. Such as the time when, intending to scold me privately for not calling, my (wonderful) father inadvertently did so on my public wall:

Or, when my (amazing) mother described her own bit of Facebook trouble after my bike wreck a few years ago:

Fair enough, understandable, and totally democratic: we are all confused by our tools to varying degrees, even if only momentarily.

The other five out of ten c-class fails come from another (and in my opinion, far more frustrating) source: the marketplace, itself wholly dependent on the innovation up-and-down. These fails are caused by obsolescence, grandiose expectations, outdated versioning, service cancellation, merges, or plain old bankruptcy. The Industry has become so good at creating buzz and usership before tools are stably deployed that unrealistic expectations of longevity are created. On the flip side, we blithe consumers are so stoked to eat it up that there is no compelling reason not to. A perfect example of the consequences of media/technology instability was when my nephew’s dedicated baby website, where my family had been journaling and uploading pictures for several years, unexpectedly disappeared with little trace or warning – no archiving option that I know of was offered, which was basically like his childhood scrapbook up and vanishing. Three larger-scale recent examples: Blio debuts missing key accessibility features, Second Life yanks its educational discount, and Google pulls Wave in its entirety due to lower than expected adoption.

While the SL news doesn’t surprise or concern me, the Wave fail did both in spades. If working with technology is replete with all classes of snafus, teaching with and/or about technology is just as perilous – often more so due to the crashing-and-burning in front of an audience element. That said, writing about working and/or teaching with technology is the most perilous of all. Why? Because as much as you might develop a robust knowledge of multifunctional tools and the ability to learn and adjust to them quickly, you still inevitably end up a) relying on specific platforms to do your own work, 2) advocating, endorsing, or demoing things in analog or digital venues that may not exist or function tomorrow, and 3) being crushed under the wheels of the traditional publishing juggernaut, which remains dismally equipped turn as fast as the pace of innovation. I recently had a perfect confluence of all three, a long story best recounted in bullets:

• As I might have mentioned once or twice, for the past three years or so I spent a ton of time writing a book on instructional technology and design.
• In chapter 6 of said book, I proposed a method for expanding one’s teaching technology repertoire by experientially evaluating the practical “affordances” of emerging tools.
• In a massively irritating move, I chose way back in the dim days of 2009 to use Google Wave, one of the emerging instructional tools of that day, as a long-form case study of how to examine these affordances.
• I triumphantly turned the page-proofed manuscript in in late July 2010…
• …less than a week later, Google made its announcement about scrapping Wave.
• I flipped out a tiny bit, then faced a decision: do I re-write Wave out of the manuscript, or leave it in with a contextualizing note that this is a perfect caution against relying on emerging tools?
• After more s.o.l.-searching and informal polling of peers and editors, I decided to leave Wave in and use it as a cautionary tale…
• …all of which set back the publication of my book by several months.
• However, it also created the added bonus of a semi-hilarious personal fail to recount,
• which is sortof the best part.

What is amazing is that I was relatively lucky: I got my proof back and a chance to fix the situation. Many technology writers/teachers/enthusiats don’t have the same luxury. There are any number of books on Google Wave already published (including this unfortunately named gem): how many in-progress works, not to mention teaching initiatives and ongoing collaborations in Wave, just bit the dust?

In a world without guarantee that the services, startups, and gadgets we use today will be around tomorrow, cultivating positive-yet-cagey flexibility is key. My personal favorite failsafes? Studied detachment and informed unflappability. Toward these ends, I propose the adoption of a new skillset into the panoply of digital age competencies: dysfunctional literacy. I have come to believe that if you do not accustom yourself to the idea of losing your best technological friend at some point or another, you are likely to become techno-developmentally maladjusted. Sociopathic, even. Preparing for the inevitable outmoding, disappearance, and/or cache-waning of today’s tech in the face of the next, ahem, wave should simply become a way of life for anyone that touches a computing or mobile device, ever.

Shoutout to Brian Mathews for his video solidarity on the Wave fail.

This post, the first I have written in quite a while, looks at two sides of a familiar problem: resource scarcity. Present times continue to try on many fronts, and I cannot think of one person from either hemisphere of my life – personal or professional – who is not actively doing more with (or for) less. As is often the way of things, examining (or imagining) positive reactions to this difficult dynamic can provide instructive lessons for how to thrive/survive.

1: recharging

On the subject of personally depleted resources, the recent blogging hiatus has been intentional. My writing brain has been officially tired for about two months, a sensation that is – thankfully and finally – starting to fade. After a long period of productivity I found myself temporarily free of giant deadlines, and in the relative calm I realized that I simply (read: desperately) needed a break. I don’t think I’ve ever gone this many weeks without posting, which at one time would have caused me no small degree of neglect-anxiety. That said, overwork when underwhlemed with ideas can result in a phenomenon not unlike prematurely removing the lid of a pressure cooker: dinner ruined plus a giant mess (and probably a second-degree burn or two, injury-to-insult style). There is no more effective quality/morale killer than obligatory maintenance: it is imperative to doff your lid at the right time, minimizing explosions. When I have lately caught myself mulling over posts, projects, etc., I have thus gently filed them away, opting for rest rather than relentlessness.

Pleasantly, this has felt like reverse hibernation: falling asleep wasted away and waking up fleshed out again. Although I have been quiet and focusing on sufficient sleep, Bay-ventures, swimming, and hammocks, this time has not been about disengaging. Quite the opposite: I am rebuilding my reserves. One thing I have noticed about periods of consistent output is that, if unbalanced by equivalent input, it is easy to risk interpreting the ideas of others narrowly, in terms of their relevance to your own. This creates shallow or egoistic understanding of new approaches necessary to ongoing growth (also known as tunnel vision). To clear my own thought-slate, I’ve been taking time to knowledge farm (e.g., explore, learn, and absorb) by reading and researching, aided hugely by working with/taking two amazing classes at Cal this term, Participatory Media for Education and Making Open Educational Resources (will post on these in more detail later in the semester).

2: retooling

On to the professional. I read this month that Drexel University is doing something wonderful: assigning a Personal Librarian to every incoming freshman. This is my idea of a dream-service, and precisely the direction libraries in higher education should be heading: toward rich, customized integration into the academic lives of individuals. The assistance we provide is most effective when it is adapted to the learning/research profile of each student or faculty member, which any service-minded instruction, reference, or outreach-oriented individual already knows. It is my opinion that no other part of the academy can provide this type of support as well as librarians: the consultant/strategist model has tremendous local potential. I think one of the reasons the Drexel service struck me is because it’s definitely more typical to hear about reduction rather than expansion these days. Mobilizing enough souls to commit an endeavor like Drexel’s seems like a herculean task in the current climate – doing-more-with-less syndrome is widespread. I’m curious if other projects had to be shelved to make way for this venture, if it is voluntary, etc. (e.g., the practical considerations that helped Drexel figure out to actually get this program rolling, which is half of what innovation is all about. For a peek at the elusive other half of innovation, check out the Harvard Library Labs Project).

While it is common practice to curtail programs when you have fewer people around to staff and support them, it is a best case scenario when resource scarcity can actually lead to effective new approaches. I’m currently in the midst of this type of situation  – changing a tried/true instruction model in response to less feet on the ground. A bit of context: over the past year or two my department has contracted to about half capacity through retirements and an ongoing hiring freeze. Needless to say, we cannot carry the same teaching load as we have in the past. After receiving word that one of the programs we have have long supported with customized one-shot sessions (Cal’s core Reading and Composition requirement) planned to hugely expand their course offerings, something about our response had to give.

Individual R/C classes require a lot of preparation: every session and syllabus is different, allowing librarians to tailor their strategies closely to each class and instructor (which makes them a challenging joy to teach). Like my colleagues, I love the in-depth personal collaboration that the traditional workshop model provided in these sessions. Faced with the difficult choice of suspending our support for this program entirely or trying something new, we developed an experimental way to tweak our old model to one less human-resource intensive, but still personalized and responsive to the eclectic mix of topics and assignments we receive. Instead of our old 60 or 90-minute in-library workshops, the new approach consists of four elements:

1) Revising the instruction intake form with an attach-your-syllabus feature to give us more up-front detail on needs and timeline

2) Creating a customized course guide for each class using our Library a la Carte pilot

3) Making an on-site 10-20 minute visit to each class to make a good pitch, demo the guide, answer questions, and put a personal face on library support, and

4) Promoting the Library Workshop: Research 101, a local customization/branding of an excellent long-form research skills tutorial created at UC Irvine, who graciously shared their source files for a Cal version at the beginning of the summer.

Moving to a guide and web tool-intensive model is a definite conceptual transition and still in its early stages, but despite some slight laptop/projector drama it appears to be working well. Course instructors seem to understand the necessity for the shift, and appreciate that what they most valued about our 60 or 90-minute customized workshops – personal attention to students and subject matter – is retained, and with a lasting digital resource that can be linked to and shared through the course management system. As a department, we’re sharing experiences and best practices as we go, trying to make this an adaptable and collaborative effort that melds to the discoveries and difficulties we encounter. Important questions about efficacy remain – how much impact will these guides have on the research skills/output of each student? Will they remember/use the guides or online Workshop? Will course instructors adapt to/adopt the new model? Will staff find their comfort level with less in-person, more digital instruction? We’re tracking guide usage with Google Analytics across the semester, and will develop a way to summatively assess instructors and students to evaluate its impact.

3: benedicting

As I transition out of writing hibernation and into a new teaching modus operandi, I’m sending a collective best of luck to all of us in our respectively stretched realities: may we flex, balance, and work through (and around) these days with grace.