Cambridge Librarian TeachMeet

We’re excited to announce that booking is now open for TeachMeet 2 on Tuesday 29th March 2011, from 6pm (drinks and nibbles from 5.30pm) to 8pm in Schlumberger.  Visit the registration page to secure your free ticket.

What’s going to happen?

TeachMeet is a fun and informal way for librarians and information professionals to share new ideas.  We’re looking for speakers willing to give a 5-minute or 2-minute presentation about ‘techie tools and/or teaching tips’ , and for enthusiastic lurkers who are keen to learn something new, engage in discussion, and have a good time!

Take part!

Places for speakers and lurkers are limited, so sign up without delay. It’s absolutely 100% free to attend, and everyone is welcome. Whether you’re a librarian, an information ninja, a shambrarian, or something else; whether you’re the head of your organisation or a junior assistant; whether you work in a university, a school, a business, or elsewhere, we’re looking forward to seeing you.

If you want to speak, the only rules we have is that your presentation mustn’t be trying to sell us anything, and you must stick to the timeslot.  You can use whatever presentation format you want: including PowerPoint, keynote, prezi, slide rocket, 280 slides, you could just talk, show something from the web, hold up a poster or you could sing a song!

Housekeeping

When you sign up we’ll ask you for your organisation and your email address.  The organisation is for Schlumberger’s security purposes, and will be shown on your name badge and the list of attendees.  Your email address is just so that we can get in touch with you about the event: it won’t be displayed publicly or passed on to anyone.
Full event details, including travel instructions, are available on the (lib)TeachMeet 2 page.

'Question mark' by Segozyme on Flickr

A TeachMeet, Wikipedia informs us, is an ‘organised (but informal) meeting (in the style of an unconference) for teachers to share good practice, practical innovations and personal insights in teaching with technology.’  In other words, it’s a way of getting all the good stuff from conferences and training courses (hearing and sharing new ideas, meeting new people, discussion) without so much of the bad stuff (having to sit through long sessions that turn out to be no good, not getting enough time to talk to people).

The idea of the TeachMeet first started to emerge in 2005 – it was the brainchild of three Scottish educators, Ewan McIntosh, David Noble and John Johnston.  TeachMeets were conceived as a way for teachers to share things, technological things, that they had tried out and that had worked. The idea spread amongst teachers across the country; 20 TeachMeets were held in 2009, and the number in 2010 will have been much higher (too high for me count up right now).  There’s a central wiki with details of forthcoming TeachMeets and sign-up pages for them, and from that you can see that there’s a lot going on.

The form of TeachMeets is not set in stone, and continues to evolve over time (a couple of interesting posts on future developments have caught my eye: ‘Sharing the ideas from TeachMeet- Introducing TeachMeet Ideas‘ and ‘TMSLF2010 and the future of TeachMeet‘), but the standard rubric for teachers’ TeachMeets tends to run as follows:

“You can come along to chat, meet new people, give a seven minute micro presentation or a two minute nano presentation. You can use whatever presentation format you want including PowerPoint, keynote, prezi, slide rocket, 280 slides, you could just talk, show something from the web, hold up a poster or you could sing a song.  The important thing is that you get your message across and you will only get one minute set up time. Be prepared for technical difficulties and be ready to wing it on the night! That’s what makes TeachMeet exciting!”

Presenters sign themselves up on the wiki to contribute to a TeachMeet. Some TeachMeets choose a random sampling of these on the night, some have them all but in a random order.  Some TeachMeets have just presentations, others also have ‘conversations’ led by someone with a particular idea to discuss. Whatever the organisational details, the emphasis in TeachMeets is on sharing ideas, and on escaping from the rigid strictures of traditional conference and presentation formats in favour of just talking to people.

Sounds good, right? So we thought it was something that could definitely be used for librarians instead of teachers, particularly since librarians also have an interest in teaching and technology.

So what are Cambridge Librarian TeachMeets like? Well, we hope they’re friendly, informal, and bursting with ideas.  The idea is that librarians from all sorts of institutions and backgrounds can come together to find out what else in going in libraries other than their own.  Expect snappy presentations, interesting conversations, and a new perspective on your daily work. (We hope!)

To find out more about the history of TeachMeets, and for some useful links I’d recommend reading this article at The H-Blog.  Dug Hall gives his take on what TeachMeet is all about in this video.