Monday, August 28, 2017

My IASL Conference Experience

Early this month I attended the International Association of School Librarianship (IASL) Annual Conference, held at California State University, Long Beach, coordinated by Dr. Lesley Farmer. As regular readers know, I am quite the "conference junkie"; I love the intense learning, networking, sharing, socializing, and energy I get from them. And, of course, every conference has a different feel to it, from overwhelming size and choices, to small and intimate.

The IASL conference was a brand new experience for me. It gave me exposure to people from all over the world - 30 countries total - in a fairly intimate group of just around 200 attendees. It was inspiring to hear success stories about school libraries around the world and wonderful to get to meet people from so many different places. It also has a strong research component, which introduced me to research by Lucy Santos Green, Melissa Johnston, and others. I have been asked to write an article about my reflections for the CSLA Journal, so will share some of my thoughts for there. I was drawn to learn more about libraries in countries I have visited, such as Sweden and Portugal, but also exposed to places I knew nothing about, such as Kazakhstan and Vietnam.

For this post, I'm going to share a reflection graphic I created, inspired mostly by an excellent session I attended by Dr. Karin Perry and Dr. Holly Weimar on Sketchnoting. They definitely convinced me of the value of creating visuals through sketching (either by hand or with software tools) to aid in processing and recall of information. So, I thought I should try one. After a few days of pondering how to get started, I realized that actual sketching is going to be a goal, not a reality this time. But ... I am hoping that making a visual that brings in my photos in lieu of drawings will help move me mentally towards that goal. So .... here it is:






















This embed is rather small, so here's a link to the original for better viewing.

For another view of the conference, visit this Storify I compiled from conference tweets: bit.ly/iaslstorify.