ALA Recap
August 24, 2007
We officially posted a summary of our meeting on the LITA Blog, but we wanted to update you here, too.
This Annual Meeting was a bit complicated for our group. There was a room mix up before we got to Washington so we weren’t in the program, we were assigned a room, but another group was on the scheduled board outside it so they were meeting there, we weren’t sure we would have a room, but the hotel was kind enough to find us another spot to meet. When all was said and done, we were a small group of three. We were disappointed we weren’t able to meet with the regular Distance Learning Interest Group folks, but the small group did allow for more detailed discussion about specifics at our institutions.
We also determined that if any group could deal with such in-person scheduling conflicts, it should be the distance learning folks! We are used to communicating across space and asynchronously, it’s our job after all. So we set up to talk about ways to make this interest group more vital throughout the year.
Our first step is this blog. Here we hope to provide a space for community discussion and a place where people can share success stories or tips. We decided that some good topics to begin with include copyright law and licensing, case studies, screen casts of things that work, and materials that distance learning librarians can share among themselves.
We also talked about trying to put together an online distance learning interest group meeting so that we can get together the 25-30 people who typically would come to our discussion group. If any of you have interest in something like this, please leave a note in the comments or email us.
Finally, we discussed programming options and submitted a proposal. We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything.
So, over the next few weeks we’ll be posting general topics here (in the same manner that we bring up general topics of discussion for the group) and would love to have discussions in the comments. If you see a better way to facilitate discussion on the blog, please let us know. We really want this to be something that is useful for everyone.
August 24, 2007 at 8:52 pm
I’m not a distance learning librarian, but I’m responsible for putting together online instructional materials – so the comments from the LITA entry about what’s a distance learner really hit home for me. As such, and given that I’m a new librarian as well, I’d definitely be interested in an online distance learning interest group meeting!
August 25, 2007 at 2:17 am
Thanks for your comments, Danielle. Fantastic to hear from you! We’ll post information about an online interest group meeting here, as well as (hopefully!) have some productive conversations. If you want to discuss something specifically, please let me know. I suspect we’ll be discussing the nature of “distance learning” in the near future, as it’s a topic we seem to be hearing more and more about (and my relation to distance learning is a lot more like yours than what we might traditionally think of). Good to know you’re here!