Arrived at the station, loaded the Gautrain card, and got my seat of choice. It was a chilly, quiet and dark winters morning, everyone dressed in coats, scarves and boots, dead-serious and reserved, and combining this with the fog visible outside and the quiet ultra-modern train.....I had a back-on-a-train-in-Europe-in-December feeling.....
(observation: I had eight people in my line of sight on the train; six of them were on their phones: texting, listening to music, or webbrowsing during the whole duration of the trip....mobile connectivity and information sharing is here to stay!)
After disembarking from the train, I bumped into Christelle Steyn from UP, a fellow social reporter at the conference. A welcome bump, as I had never been to the Sandton station or the Sandton Conference Centre before and she was able to lead the way. Registration at the venue was followed by taking our places at a table in the middle of the workshop venue reserved for the social team. Our conference bags were bright and cheerful, the social reporter scarves a special Pavlinka-style red, and the wifi connection up and running and reliable.
My first task of the day was to report via twitter during Michael Stephens' presentation Taming technolust: technology planning in a hyperlinked world. Tweeting during the talk was fun and presented no problems.....this is actually quite an understatement as our #saoim tweeting resulted in our hashtag ending up trending at position number 4 for a while!
From a librarian/delegate's point of view the workshop was a great success; touching on topical issues such as identifying and implementing new technology trends, and ways in which new technologies can be used to better serve users and attract them to the library and its services. Interesting terms such as technodivorce and technoshame were also explained and enjoyed.....we've all had experiences of those feelings and emotions at one point in the workplace!
Many photographs of the speakers as well as delegates were also taken by the social reporters before, during and after the workshop. The social reporters posing proudly with their red scarves were also photographed!
Lunch was followed by Karen Blakeman's workshop titled Personalisation of search: take back control. Karen highlighted a variety of search engines, explained the idiosyncrasies of various search engines, exposed us to ways enabling better search results and techniques to bypass search-engine pitfalls. I found the talk interesting indeed; while listening to her talk I was also spending some time working on this blog posting.
1 comment:
I must say, I love the Gautrain for that antisocialness there is that unwritten "no socializing" rule.
The main challenge for me was, I took this social reporting duty for granted. I tweet often on my personal capacity, now it was different I had to clean up my language no slang. What if I don't agree with the speaker, social as my duty is now I have to chant "this is work, this is work". Overall I'm enjoying this, all thanks to the wonderful team.
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