With a Little Help from Our Friends

It’s time to come clean. Yes, I love technology. But, at times, I’m also intimidated by it.

Sure, I’m comfortable with all the stuff that supports me as an editor and a librarian, the tools that help me find and share information—everything from RSS feeds and blogs to wikis and Twitter. I belong to social networks like LinkedIn (boring) and Facebook (fun, and a good resource for keeping up with librarians). These are tools that I can control (or, at least, I think I can).

But at last month’s School Library Journal Leadership Summit, which focused on school librarians as leaders of 21st-century learning, I forced myself outside my comfort zone. I brought in technology so that those who couldn’t attend the two-day event in Washington, DC, could follow it in real time from their computers at work and home. Opening up the summit like that was potentially disruptive and certainly uncontrollable.

To be honest, I didn’t do much. I just reached out to Cathy Jo Nelson, a librarian at Dorman High School in Roebuck, SC, and Buffy Hamilton, a high school librarian in the Cherokee County (SC) School District, and asked them to serve as our summit’s “tech mavens.” That’s one of the great things about SLJ. We have a whole world of experts at our fingertips: our readers.

Along with Kathy Ishizuka, SLJ’s technology editor, they brought the conference to life for scores of librarians nationwide through a number of free technology tools (for more on the summit’s technology, see Christopher Harris’s “Conferences Are All a Twitter,” p. 15). They introduced virtual panelists through Skype and Elluminate, used CoveritLive to create a backchannel, or live discussion, during the presentations, set up a Ning (sljsummit.ning.com) to share much of the experience, and even streamed one of the sessions live.

I might be coming late to this party, but for me the experience was nothing short of transformative. I especially appreciated the backchannel during the two keynote speeches, which conveyed the audience’s reactions—and occasional remarks from those following the speeches virtually—making the presentations truly interactive experiences. Social media worked on two different levels: to mine the intellectual capital of those physically present and to engage participants across the country.

Summits, like all good conferences, involve a tremendous amount of planning and work. The topics, I believe, are of immediate relevance to the profession. And they bring together a unique and heady mix of top-notch school librarians and researchers, experts from outside our field, and leaders from among our sponsors, which included Capstone Publishers as well as Follett Library Resources, Follett Software Company, Gale Cengage Learning, Rosen Publishing, Safari Montage, and Scholastic Library Publishing. Summits are focused, intense, and dynamic, like a 36-hour combustion.

They’re also limited to 200 participants—the perfect number for this particular event. Yet this limitation has always bothered me. After all, if I believe so much in the summit’s value, why shouldn’t more school librarians be able to participate in it? And why not document more of the experience so that the combustion just doesn’t go up in smoke?

Blending the physical and the virtual answers these questions, while also enriching the experience for those who attend.

Thanks to Cathy Jo and Buffy, I’ll never plan an in-person event in the same way again. And I encourage everyone, from those on the state level to those working nationally, to take that leap and open your conferences up to the world. Together, we’ve got a lot to learn.

bkenney@reedbusiness.com