Bit of context
One advantage of being based in London is the multitude of events that you can go to of professional interest and for networking. The events come from a wide array of organizations and I once sat on the CILIP in London committee, helping to organize events for LIS professionals. Indeed one aspect of my role was in setting up a number of digital profiles and initiatives, including a calendar which sought to aggregate London events of interest from CILIP and other bodies (partly to stop us booking events on the same dates as other events!).
I left the committee largely due to time commitments and since then I have not done very well at attending in-person evening events (although I continue to attend large numbers of webinars and have managed to make a number of events ‘in work time’). Anyway, I did manage to make an event this week (partly as Wednesday is by far the best day for me) and a few notes are below.
The event
The Tech Meet Up promised a number of quick 3 or 7 minute presentations on technologies that people are using which might be of interest to a wider audience.
It was a fantastic example of:
- How innovative people can be in thinking of new ways to serve their users/businesses via tech
- How varied CILIP’s membership is and the value in the sharing of ideas amongst it.
Presentations included:
- Aurasma – for adding augmented reality around displays, guidance, via QR codes to explain how physical tech works, etc. I particularly like the idea of using augmented reality on a final product to trigger videos showing how it was produced, stills on the production process, etc.
- InMagic (new to me) – for easy creation of bespoke databases. The tool looked ugly but easy to use and, as the presentation stated, it is possible to use it for what would otherwise be expensive systems (for example on independence checking relating to clients).
- RSS – this went beyond the basics of RSS (as you might suspect considering the audience – although a number of people admitted abandoning RSS post Google Reader) to how the presenter is using RSS to monitor 2500 companies across 60 countries. As one might guess considering that scale, he is hacking together a number of tools including the BASE search engine, FireFox plugins (such as Bamboo), twitrss, feed43 and RSSMix.
- Learning Apps on VLE – how you can use LearningApps.org (new to me?) to easily create learning objects for embed into a VLE//LMS.
- B.scroative (new to me) – audience response with a very nice interface for quizzing with pros/cons vs other systems such as Kahoot.
On top of the above, and a discussion on eBooks, I did a couple of presentations…
My presentations
I let the organizers know that I was happy to do a number of presentations on different tech areas I have been working on. What I ended up doing is roughly captured in the embedded Slideshare presentation.
I deliberately avoided creating any content myself – instead sourcing the presentations from online sources (please excuse ignoring of creative commons) to talk about the issues related to the space and the kind of technology solutions that can be brought into play.
- Learning communities via Enterprise Social Networks (ESN), specifically Tibbr. A consideration of how ESN functionality has evolved what we can do in relation to online community support.
- Capability/competency frameworks and the impact on learning support, including targeting resources, courses, coaching and other support at a more granular level. Interestingly, “Workplace learning and competency-based frameworks” was a title of an article in the latest CILIP Update. The article’s suggested approach seemed a sensible evolution, from my more manual mapping using tools such as those in SuccessFactors LMS’s CDP module, to a more data automated approach.
Whose Education Is It Anyway? 
Good webinar on competencies for information professionals here: https://npsig.wordpress.com/webinars-2/past-webinars/2015-2/