Yesterday I took part in a session with Martin Weller and Grainne Conole pitching SocialLearn to the Library (Martin), exploring notions of a pedagogy fit for online social learning (Grainne) and idly wodering about how the Library might fit in all this, especially if it became ‘invisible’ (my bit: The Invisible Library):
As ever, the slides are pretty meaningless without me rambling over them… but to give a flavour, I first tried to set up three ideas of ‘invisibleness’:
– invisibility in everyday life (random coffee, compared to Starbucks: if the Library services were coffee, what coffee would they be, and what relationship would, err, drinkers have with them?);
– positive action, done invisibly (the elves and the shoemaker);
– and invisible theatre (actors ‘creating a scene’ as if it were real (i.e. the audience isn’t aware it’s a performance), engaging the audience, and leaving the audience to carry on participating (for real) in the scenario that was set up).
And then I rambled a bit a some webby ways that ‘library services’, or ‘information services’ might be delivered invisibly now and in the future…
After the presentations, the Library folks went into groups for an hour or so, then reported back to the whole group in a final plenary session. This sort of exercise is pretty common, I think, but it suddenly struck me that it could be far more interesting in the ‘reporter’ on each table was actually twittering during the course of the group discussion? This would serve to act as a record for each group, might allow ‘semi-permeable’ edges to group discussions (although maybe you don’t want groups to be ‘sharing’ ideas, and would let the facilitator (my experience is that there’s usually a facilitator responsible whenever there’s a small group exercise happening!) eavesdrop on every table at the same time, and maybe use that as a prompt for wandering over to any particular group to get them back on track, or encourage them to pursue a particular issue in a little more detail?
OUseful.Info, the blog... 