12 Apps of Christmas

Today I enrolled on the 12 Apps of Christmas course and completed the pre-course survey. It is offered by Regent's University London and is hosted on Blackboard.

I first heard about the course in June, when I attended a workshop at the ARLG 2016 conference. I'd never heard of it before then, and to be honest I'm not quite sure why. Because I'm relatively new to HE libraries? Because I'm a solo librarian and my networking is limited? Or does the course have a low profile? I don't think it's the latter, as hundreds of people have completed it over the past few years. When you change sector it can take a while to find/establish new links and I think that may be why I hadn't heard of this course previously.

Anyhoo, as soon as I did hear of it, I was hooked! I really like the idea. I have little knowledge of using apps in education and am keen to learn more. An added bonus is the ability of communicating with other participants via the Twitter hashtags (#RUL12AoC, #12AoC); it's interesting and fun to see what other folks are up to. Plus, I have little experience of MOOCs, so this is a good way to dip my toes in the water. The only online course I've ever done was CPD 23 Things, back in 2011. I really enjoyed it, so if this is even partly similar, I'll enjoy this too.

#ARLG16 part 2: Attending

Last week I attended the ARLG 2016 conference, held at Conference Aston within Aston University. I attended for just one day, Tuesday 28^th July, and this blog post will record which sessions I attended and the overall experience of being a conference delegate.

The morning keynote speaker was Peter Kilcoyne, ILT director at Heart of Worcestershire College. He outlined a large scale project regarding blending learning within FE. Colleges are encouraged to participate in blended learning as a means of combatting teacher shortages, but creating online resources on a mass scale is expensive and time consuming. HoW college leads a consortium, which colleges may join for a fee. The idea is all member colleges will create resources which will be shared amongst fellow members, thus saving time (and therefore money) in the creation of online resources. The project was outlined from IT and senior management perspectives rather than a teaching perspective and this was reflected in the content. Coming from a college background, I could see the value in the project and it was interesting to learn of it, but at times I felt this particular presentation’s relevance to librarians was limited. Saying that, it was good to see a keynote session coming from an FE perspective – the majority of sessions appear to be aimed at HE practitioners. 

#ARLG16 part 1: Presenting

Recently, I have been lucky enough to present a workshop at the ARLG 2016 conference. This came about as a result of my winning ARLG’s Alison Northover Bursary, which I used to attend the 2014 ARLG conference.  I had such an amazing experience attending the conference that I was determined to contribute to the next one.

I kept my eyes open for the call for papers, submitted a proposal in December 2015 and in January 2016 found out it had been accepted. I was thrilled! The proposal was based around a book folding workshop, to be co-presented with an ex-colleague, Fran Heap. In the past, Fran and I had both used book folding to lead various library initiatives to engage users and raise the profile of the library. We felt we could share these experiences in the hope that other library staff may be interested.