Ballad in Plain E

At SLA this past June, I attended a session on personal information management (PIM) and made a little note of it here at my blog. Over at Slaw, Joel Alleyne has just posted his review of William Jones’ book, “Keeping Found Things Found“, which was the basis of the PIM session at SLA. I’d like to read it…some day…when I manage to find a few extra hours in the day!

SLA Legal Division just released the summer issue of Legal Division Quarterly, which contains a bunch of session summaries, including a detailed synopsis of “If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Tales from the Dark Side”, written by Tracy Leming. (At the conference, I caught only the tail-end of it.)

There’s also a good article on “Navigating the Exhibition Hall” by Devin Gawnemark. Check it out!

This was one of the best sessions I attended. Dr. Ilda Carreiro King is an educational and development psychologist who specialises in helping teachers learn how to teach more successfully. In this session, she focused on learning styles of adults versus children. Here are some of the key points she made about characteristics of adult learners:

• It cannot be overemphasized that adults need to know what’s in it for them; what is the practical benefit. They want to see current, precise examples that are relevant to their work
• Adults generally don’t care about knowledge for its own sake. The best motivators are interest and selfish benefit
• It is critical that adults not feel singled out or intimidated
• Peer learning is a powerful tool because it uses accountability and shares the risk of “looking stupid”

Points about teaching:

• When teaching, you will default to the way you, yourself, were taught, even though you may know better
• You should always be prepared to vary your schedule. Try not to say “I’m going to cover that later”
• Offer many opportunities for “Processing breaks” where learners talk to each other about a topic. This cements the ideas for them and also uses peer accountability.
• Never put an expert with a novice. If you had twenty students and they were ranked from 1 (novice) to 20 (expert), you would pair 1 with 11, 2 with 12, etc.
• You should judge your teaching success on how well the average person has learned. The top 15-20% can already learn well no matter what.

Techniques:

• Paired learning: one person reads instructions from a script, the other follows the instructions. You would think that only the person DOING is learning, but actually, the “teacher” learns more because he is having to follow and analyse the steps the “doer” is taking
• Adults are less interested in survey courses, and more interested in in-depth training on specific topics
• Use one dataset throughout multiple tasks
• The learner’s opportunity to do discuss, do hands-on practice, and then coach someone else in the same task dramatically improves his actual learning.

Amazing session, probably the best at the conference!

I learned last year that the PAM Division Party is legen…wait for it…dary! at SLA and this year was no exception. The theme was “Prom”, and, oddly, “Under the Sea” (the party was actually co-hosted with two other divisions, and I guess the theme-wires got crossed, or intertwined, or something…) and we all got “PROM” earrings and feather tiaras.

From librarians gettin’ in on to “Hot in Herre” to Stephen Abram cutting a rug to “You Shook Me All Night Long”, this is an event that I will always look forward to! I ran into the cool fun girl I’d met on the monorail the previous night, and she was clearly the best dancer during “Baby Got Back”. Pickup lines abounded (”I like your dress! Actually, it reminds me of some curtains my mom had!”)(”Wow, that flower you’re wearing is as big as your head. Your head is much prettier!”) and the security staff looked beyond perplexed, but everyone had a fantastic time.

And they have the nerve to schedule 8am sessions the next morning…

(Oh yeah, the Inmagic reception was microbrew-licious, too.)

William Jones of University of Washington Information School spoke on personal information management (PIM). While Jones was a good presenter and this session was interesting, it was more about theories of PIM, and not on practical skills, as I had expected. A key point I took from this is that the action of writing something down is more powerful than re-reading it. He also discussed the merits of tagging vs. folder structures and described some neat studies he has been working on (see Keeping Found Things Found & Tales of PIM message board).

I only caught the last half-hour of this session, as it was running concurrently to the WOMM session. I wish I’d been able to attend the whole thing. Fortunately, one of my colleagues was there for the whole session and took meticulous notes, which she’ll be sharing! This panel was composed of librarians who used to be vendors/trainers and vice versa, and they offered frank discussion on how to improve vendor-librarian relations and negotiations. Here’re are some of the tips I caught:

• Always stay professional; keep your emotions out of the equation
• What’s in it for me: the trainer should tell the audience within the first 30-seconds, but you may need to help them focus that pitch by immediately telling them your needs
• The vendor is never out to get you, personally, just your firm’s business, at any cost
• Put yourself in the other’s shoes before you meet
• Don’t pass the buck: if you do, the vendor will go above your head to the person who they think can make the decision – keep yourself in the transaction
• The schmooze factor works both ways
• If you feel you’re stuck with a bad vendor, don’t waste your time. Request a new one.
• Take advantage of librarian-relations programs and services
• If you really don’t have the money, be honest and firm and say just that. If you have a particularly persistent vendor who won’t listen, be serious: “You will NEVER get my business if you don’t stop this.”
• When working with trainers, be specific. Tell them not to train outside your contract. Good trainers keep notes and should remember your preferences and specifications.

Deborah Aho Williamson is a senior analyst at eMarketer, and she presented a session on Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM). The main types of WOMM are:

1. Brand monitoring (e.g., Yelp.com)
2. Viral marketing (esp. YouTube)
3. Influencer marketing (e.g., Proctor & Gamble Vocalpoint: a “community of influential moms, created by P&G”)
4. Brand blogging (e.g., Nuts about Southwest blog)

WOMM is all about conversation creation, about learning and using the language that people use when talking about products.

There are varying trust levels for different types of ads: Consumers have only a 13% level of trust for mobile text ads, 63% for newspaper ads, and 78% for recommendations by other consumers. An interesting point is that in the travel market, user-generated content is more influential than brand.

In the end it’s all a bit touchy feely: we are urged to “Start a conversation” rather than “advertise on social networks”. I wanted to ask about the speaker’s thoughts on companies posing as consumers and posting to sites like Amazon, etc., with favourable reviews, but we ran out of time.

The highlight for me at this reception was getting to meet Karen S., my soon-to-be colleague in Winnipeg. [Karen and Brenda, who I know a little from Vancouver, blog at Library Technician Dialog.] We had a great time comparing notes on our jobs and she gave me the scoop on the Winnipeg law library scene. Heard all about Rex from Andornot’s upcoming adventures abroad. Saw the back of Connie Crosby’s head but didn’t get to meet her! Did meet a lot of other cool cool people, though, as we headed to the Lexis Dessert Reception at the Experience Music Project and then to the Elsevier party at W hotel (nice: champagne, live band, more dessert).

Oh yeah, and we discovered that a great way to meet people is to grab them as they’re walking by and exclaim “Are you someone famous?”

This session by Mary Ellen Bates, who I think is amazing, didn’t quite live up to my expectations, but only because its focus wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be. The session was very centred on how to provide services to digital natives. My big takeaway from this session was that “perfection is the enemy of good enough”. “Good enough” is just that – digital natives are used to Beta mode and are completely comfortable fooling around and figuring things out. What makes them most mad is seeing absolute error messages – warnings that you’ve done something wrong, but not suggesting ways to correct syntax, etc.

Wow, this session was so interesting! Dave Snowden, a UK-based KM guru and founder of Cognitive Edge, gave a funny, engaging 90-minute talk on the human side of KM, incorporating neuroscientific principles and debunking some common misconceptions about why KM works or fails. The points that really stood out to me were:

• Knowledge sharing is only ever voluntary and CANNOT be conscripted
• People need to be able to trust the people they share their knowledge with. The mentality is one of fear: “If I share my knowledge, and it doesn’t work, I’ll get blamed. If I share it and it does work, that person will take the credit for it.”
• Knowledge is highly contextual. We only know what we know when we need to know it.
• The way we describe how we do things is completely different from how we actual do things.
• Three main types of knowledge:

1. Things we only know by doing – muscle memory – this is why the Master/Apprentice training program for trades is the most successful knowledge sharing and transfer program in the history of the world.
2. Things that we can tell by a story – bringing memories to the forefront; rehearsing – narrative-based
3. Things that we can actually write down

• Most management theories are based on the manufacturing sector, which is based on closed systems. Those practices don’t work when put in an open system.
• Human brains are masters of pattern recognition, not information processing.
• You can’t replicate success by imitating. For example, the CEOs of the world’s top 10 companies all golf. This doesn’t mean that if you golf, you’ll be a top 10 CEO, too.
• The idea of the “elevator pitch” says something about a culture: that you must be able to sum up a complex theory within fifteeen seconds.

Snowden also went on to describe how Liverpool Museum found a successful way to have museum visitors give meaningful, useable, accurate feedback. I urge you to listen to Snowden’s podcast and check out the slides from this session – the sound quality of the podcast is not great, but it’s worth it. The slides contain the famous “basketball video” – amazing!