Happy New Year! And welcome back to Developing@City on this horrible grey and rainy Monday morning.
Back in the wilds of November, which seems a million years or so ago now, I attended the 2013 London LibTeachMeet at Imperial College. A LibTeachMeet is a low-cost way of sharing teaching experiences, good practices, bits of research done by teachers and trainers, and of meeting other people in your area who teach Information Literacy skills. I believe the idea was originally developed by teachers in Scotland and has been borrowed by librarians.
LibTeachMeets are organised, but informal. Speakers are arranged in advance, but the idea is to get a lot of ideas out into the open quite quickly, so each presenter has only 5 minutes to present their work. This year at Imperial, there were 11 speakers in one afternoon, covering topics including LibGuides, gamification, moving from paper to Moodle, developing Business information resources online, and improving e-book access. The programme is available online, as are the various presentations that speakers used.
LibTeachMeets are usually free and very low-cost, and frequently involve cake in my experience, so if you’re interested in meeting IL practitioners and learning more about how we approach problems and innovations in IL teaching, I’d recommended going along to one.
Image from The Commons on Flickr; I thought it might be nice to be reminded that in some parts of the world this time of year is sunny and beach-filled!