The Only Laptop in the Room (and a Worthwhile Keynote Paper)

I’m not certain what I think it means but … I am attending this conference – The Student as Scholar: Undergraduate Research and Creative Practice – and am the only person I see with a laptop in the sessions. So different than presenting at ACRL and other recent library conferences where the blog posts about my presentations were posted to the web by attendees before I gathered my things up and left the podium. I sometimes wonder if librarians make too much of our willingness to embrace technology and use it to our advantage but then …

In any case, let me use my laptop to your advantage – take a look at the keynote – From Convocation to Capstone: Developing the Student as Scholar. Some interesting ideas and obvious connections to information literacy. I particularly think that academic librarians might benefit from becoming familiar with LEAP: Liberal Education and America’s Promise and especially the report College Learning for the New Global Century.

Author: Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe

Lisa is Head, Undergraduate Library, Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction, Office of Services, and Associate Professor, Library Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

3 thoughts on “The Only Laptop in the Room (and a Worthwhile Keynote Paper)”

  1. Thanks for this, Lisa! I saw that conference and was intrigued by it. We shamelessly borrowed the concept for our own on-campus faculty development workshop this June so the capstone text will be particularly worthwhile to us. Blog on!

    I, too, recommend the LEAP report. It’s a nice summation of many things we all need to think about, and information literacy is one of the core skills it identifies. Actually, the whole series, along with the original Greater Expectations report are useful and thought-provoking.

  2. Hmm, that happened to me too at the OLA Superconference in February. At literally every single session I attended (and they were all the more techie/2.0 sessions) I was the only person in the audience with a laptop. I wondered if I was breaking some sort of OLA etiquette after a while…very weird.

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