What came across very clearly from these discussions (both about the current state of Chartership and desired future directions) was the conviction that everyone involved had that the aim of Chartership is to improve the profession by helping individual professionals improve themselves.

Chartership isn’t meant to be a chore. It’s meant to be a tool to help you plan and make the most of your own personal and professional development. It’s not hoops to jump through because CILIP think it’ll be fun to load more work on you and watch you squirm. The goal of Chartership is for you to become a better professional, one who reflects on their learning, performance, and development.

I gave a brief outline on Twitter of what I think of as the 4 stages of Chartership:

1) identify what you need to learn

2) learn it

3) put what you’ve learned into practice in the workplace & profession

4) write down how & why you did 1-3 along with what difference it’s made for you/work, & what you’ll do next. Submit. Celebrate

To expand:

1) Identify what you need to learn. Since I chartered, the new version of the CILIP PKSB has been released, and Chartership in the future will be encouraging use of this as a self-assessment tool. I’d strongly recommend using it to look at doing a skills audit of what you know now and what you need to know. But it’s not the only thing you should be thinking about. You need to assess your skills against the demands of your role (or desired role) and workplace. Look at your job description and see what bits you’d like to be able to do more of, or do better. Look at your users. Do they have needs you’re not meeting? Could you learn the skills to enable you to meet those needs?

Stick all of this down in your PPDP. This is a living document, and will change as you progress through Chartership. Use it however best suits you to work out a development strategy. You might then need to tidy it up a bit to put in your portfolio – but you might not! A PPDP that shows evidence of use and development is exactly what the assessors are looking for – just make sure it’s comprehensible (expand acronyms, explain colour-coding etc). And the stuff in your PPDP doesn’t have to come from some special bank of development activities you’re doing ‘for Chartership’ – it comes from what you need to do for your own development. Manager given you training goals in your last staff review? PPDP them! Job you want in 5 years require a new skill? Add it to the plan. It’s all about what makes you a better professional – no barriers, no silos.

2) Learn it. I think this is actually the bit of Chartership that daunts people the least. We’re info pros. We do learning. It’s worth remembering, though, that any kind of learning and development counts. I know some people worry that they haven’t been on enough training courses or to enough conferences – but that’s ok. Chartership is all about the ‘why’. Why did you learn this skill from a book instead of going on a course? (‘We didn’t have a training budget’ is a perfectly legitimate answer, by the way).

As long as you give the reasons behind what you do, show that you’ve thought about the why of it all, you will produce the right sort of portfolio. No-one is judging the training and development activities you’ve chosen to do. They’re not going to think ‘oh, well, I don’t think that’s the best resource available on that topic. They should have consulted [x] instead.’ As long as you explicitly state in your portfolio how the development activity relates to a need you identified and what impact undertaking that activity had on you, they will accept that you have selected the most appropriate development method for your needs and circumstances.

3) Put what you’ve learned into practice in the workplace & profession. Knock their socks off.

4) Write down how & why you did 1-3 along with what difference it’s made for you/work, & what you’ll do next. This is a lot less daunting if you do it as you go along! Jo Alcock has created a great template to help with this, and I believe that the new CILIP VLE will be tailored to help with ongoing recording and reflection, too. Reflective writing can be a bit of a pain if you’re not used to it (or not naturally that way inclined), but remember that you don’t have to produce torrents of deathless prose. Here’s my suggested tool for relatively quick and easy reflection.

Taken from a presentation I gave at SLA2012 in Chicago.

There’s no one way to produce a great Chartership portfolio. It’s a reflection of you as a practitioner. So there are no hard and fast rules about size, content, layout – it’s left to you and your professional judgement. The portfolio is your chance to show how good you are at selecting and organising information. Don’t let yourself be intimidated by some mystic idea of ‘what the assessors expect to see’. Think about their information needs. What do you particularly want to convey to them? What do they especially need to know? Are you providing the right information, in the right quantities and the right format to allow them to assess your application? Are you showing the judgement expected of an information professional?

(But you’re not expected to magically know these things! Asking for peer support and advice is part of being an info pro. Your mentor, Candidate Support Officer, the CILIP quals team, the mailing lists, your colleagues – they’re all there to help. And they’ve all needed to ask for help too! They’re a resource, so use them as you need to.)

Treat the Chartership process as an opportunity for you to have some quality ‘me and my development time’, a chance to have someone chivvy you into reflecting about what you do, and a chance to celebrate your successes – and even if you never get round to handing that portfolio in, you’ll be a better professional at the end of it. And that’s something worth celebrating

Filter bubbles are supposed to be a bad thing, but only if you get the filter wrong. I agree that’s it’s not conducive to a healthy mind to filter out dissenting voices and viewpoints – but there are certain things which I feel a better person for filtering out.

So I don’t read:

1) Celebrity news. My knowledge of celebrity culture has gone down since I started getting my news from the internet. Most of my celeb knowledge comes through the weird and wonderful filter of twitter (who’s Harry Styles? Someone people like to tell about their dead pets)

Seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? The internet is full of celebrity news and gossip. Without it, there would be nothing left but cats, bacon, and this gif. But you can choose not to read it. When I was consuming my news in print, I would sometimes read celeb stories. Why not? It’s there on the page, and it takes 5 seconds to skim. But now if I want to do a five-second skim to see who [x] is dating, I have to click on the article to do so. And the stats counters don’t care if I don’t really want to read it. they don’t care if I was reading it ironically. they don’t care if I was only reading it so I could go ‘oh em gee guys, I can’t believe they’re publishing this crap.’

And I don’t want them to publish that crap. Not on serious news sites. It’s not news, and I’m not going to validate your claim that it is by giving you that click.

2) True crime – reports of murder trials/investigations, “terrorist plots”, manhunts. All that sensationalist stuff. This I avoid for a couple of reasons: one, I don’t want to encourage sensationalist reporting. And two, I don’t need to know the details of a tragedy to mourn for it. I don’t need to know what the weapon or the motivation was, and I certainly don’t need to know how the victim’s mother looked in court, you ghoulish bastards.

Leave people alone to mourn as they need to, and part of all of us will mourn with them, whether it’s headline news or not.

3)The Daily Mail. Whatever they try. Nuff said. (Want a more eloquent explanation of why you shouldn’t? Read this)

4) Linkbait articles. You know, the ones with the headlines that seem too good to be true. And they’re not just done by content farms, desperate for clicks.  Otherwise reputable publications are guilty of it, too (I’m looking at you, Nature). These are one of the hardest to avoid, because they’re often difficult to identify, so I try to use the lovely and knowledgeable people on my twitter stream to help curate – if lots if them are reading & retweeting, it’s probably worth my time (or it’s about cats. or gin). To add to the power of a timeline full of information professionals comes the fab @HuffPoSpoilers , who selflessly read the Huffington post linkbait articles and post the main details, along with the baiting headline.

So, four things that my internet existence (and life in general) is better off without reading. But, contrary to all received wisdom, I do read…

The comments. I know you’re not supposed to, but you find so much of humanity in them, in all its best and worst. Take youtube, for instance, supposed to be the pit of all that is worst in internet comments. If I didn’t read the comments, I’d never have found the video where someone mentioned that this song was played at his dad’s funeral, and the other comments were sincere sympathy and offers of support. If I didn’t read the comments, I’d never have had to confront the intellectual snobbery that made me surprised that the Daily Mirror comments section  attracts better written and  less knee-jerk comments than the Guardian.

Yes, some comments are stupid. Yes, some comments are purposefully trolling. Yes, some comments make me swear, shake angry fists at the screen, and despair of humanity. But there’s beauty and wit and intelligence and joy in there, too. And they’re the voice of the people (or at least a vocal subset thereof), and that’s something I don’t want to filter out.

How obvious! I thought, how simple! Sometimes you just need an expert to point out these elegant little tricks. And I thanked her, and went away with my new brushes, and my new techniques, and my new knowledge that ‘spit, don’t rinse’ was the way forward.

And I went home, and dutifully used my new brushes and applied my new techniques, and at the end I rinsed my mouth out, exactly the same way as I’ve done twice a day every day for the past 30 years.

Oh well! I’ll get it tomorrow. After all, I’ve managed with the new brushes and the new routine, and that’s a much bigger change. This is so simple! So easy! I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it in no time.

***

Into work in the morning, and the first thing I do is click to open my emails. As they load, I think ‘oh no! I wasn’t supposed to be doing this now.’ I work best at the end of the day, and can find mornings drifting away in an orgy of unproductive reading and clicking. My solution is simple and easy: do some work as soon as I get in, before I open my emails or twitter or my blog feeds. What can possibly be so important it can’t wait?

20 minutes of routine work to start the day and I’m instantly in a more productive groove. I’ve achieved something. The day is off to a good start. All it takes is that one small, simple change of not clicking the outlook icon as soon as my PC boots every morning. How hard can it be?

***

As an information professional, I’m worried about my day-to-day information retrieval. I want to move away from the domination of Google for my casual searching. I’ve heard good things about Duck Duck Go! Let’s change my default search engine. That’s a quick, easy change, which can improve my day-to-day search experience. So I make the change in my browser and my clickto extensions – and then a few weeks later I reinstall my PC. Time to make that simple change again…

***

I have failed to make all three of these changes. I still rinse after brushing. Outlook is still the first program I open in the morning. Google is still my default search engine. Why? What’s wrong with me, that I’ve failed to make such quick, simple, easy changes? I’ve coped with much bigger things.

The answer, of course, is that what’s wrong with me is how I’m seeing these changes. They may be simple, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy. They’re difficult precisely because they’re simple. Things that require thought are often easier to change, because you have something to change: a process, a way of thought; something that involves a major change has more indicators to remind you of the change.

How you see a challenge will change how you face it. You’re more likely to spend time thinking about major challenges, working out how to tackle them, reminding yourself that this thing has changed and you must do these things in response. A quick, simple, easy change? Well, it’s quick, and simple, and easy. Why would I need to think about it?

So now I’m forcing myself to give these changes the respect they need. I have spent 5, 10, 30 years doing the things that need changing. They may only be a simple behaviour, but they’re an ingrained one. To borrow the metaphor from this post (about learning as bug fixing), these changes are a patch: they may only be a few lines long, but they will fundamentally change my source code. And you should never take rewriting your source code lightly.

So: I have three fundamental changes I want to make to improve my productivity and general well-being. they may be a bit of a struggle, but I’m sure I’ll get there. After all, who said change would be easy?

*It keeps the fluoride in, dontchaknow.

I’d echo Ian’s reasons for sharing: not because I think these assignments are fabulous, but to help raise awareness of what a qualification in librarianship involves. But there’s also personal learning to be taken from them – how much have I learned in the last 5 years? Rather a lot, it seems (apparently, in 2008, I thought web 2.0 was the semantic web. umm…). How much have I forgotten in the last 5 years? Equally, rather a lot (please don’t ask me to construct a Dialog search strategy. Please).

And as well as looking at my personal development, it’s interesting to think about how (if?) library school curricula have changed across time, and how they vary across institutions. Looking at Ian’s list of assignments, I can see similarities (create a catalogue record, business plan), but also topics we didn’t cover (marketing, digital divide). CILIP accredited courses are expected to cover a range of topics from the Professional Knowledge and Skills Base, but it’s interesting to see where particular institutions put their focus, and how that focus might shift over time.

So, here are the library school assignments that a) I still have copies of and b) weren’t group assignments. Those that I don’t have copies off might have been assessed in different ways – we had several presentations to do, along with database design that was hand-drawn on paper, and a digital library that required specialist software.

These are not intended to be shining examples of how to be the best library school student ever (related: please don’t laugh at me too much), but will hopefully stand useful as an example of the range of what professional librarians were expected to do/know/learn, at a particular place and time.

Cataloguing & classification

Dialog search strategy

The Identity Cards Act 2006 has now passed into law. Identify and critically evaluate the potential impacts of this legislation

LMS selection and implementation

Report on web page creation

Team development: a case study

Technical issues related to Institutional Repository Software (partial script for joint presentation)

Thesaurus constuction

Digital library collection policy

Library 2.0: a report

Skills/roles needed in a digital library team

Mems is our natty word for the morsels of interesting and relevant information you see beneath every word on Memrise. Mems can be mnemonics, etymologies, amusing videos, photos, example sentences: anything which helps connect what you’re learning and bring it to life.

I think of mems as the sticky note attached to the new word or fact – and the weirder, the better. The more unusual or amusing the mem is, the more likely you are to recall it and its associated fact. I first came across this idea during maths in school, when we were told to come up with our own silly phrases to remember SOHCAHTOA. I’m still resentful that they said mine was ‘too silly’, and made me learn Silly Old Harry Caught A Haddock Trawling Off America. Ok, I still remember it – but I remember mine better, and without having to think ‘it was a fish that began with h. What fish begin with h? And anyway, what’s silly about catching a haddock?’

And I’ve definitely been finding the slightly more obtuse mems the most useful, such as ‘a woman and a shameful kangaroo‘ for cooked rice. Ok, I don’t see the kangaroo myself, but I remember that someone else did.

I often find myself putting my own twist on the mems that other people have provided. For instance, my personal mem for ‘vorrei’ is ‘Ketel One’, based on this mem, but adding the fact that the specific Ray I’m buying a drink for is Ray from Achewood*.

But the stickiest mem I’ve found is this:

It´s all very well being told details to remember (these are useful too), but I need something to jog my memory that relates to what they look like and links it to the name. So for this one, imagine the tune to California Dreaming, but with the first line going:
“Alder leaves are round…”

I defy you to ever sing California Dreaming the same way again…

Memrise also allows you to create your own courses, and it looks like some teachers are using it to reinforce learning for specific courses. I’ve found GCSE RE, Australian Year 10 Chemistry, and B6 Biology.

If you can get student take-up, this seems like a great idea. Thinking library/info lit specific, you could create a course to teach specific styles of referencing, or Dewey/LoC/classification system of your choice (though I’m not sure anyone actually wants to learn the Dewey classes). Personally, I’ve run aground on the mountain of ‘mems for MARC fields’ (my best attempt so far. Seriously. It’s hard.)

Thinking about what makes a good mem has made me think about learning, and my teaching/presenting style. I’ve realised that what I’m doing when I add images and text to my slides (such as here or here), what I’m actually doing is trying to add a mem to the slide. I usually think of the key point that I want people to take from the slides, then find an image to reinforce that point. I prefer interesting and slightly unusual images – if people remember the image, they’re more likely to remember the point.

I think this is what sits behind using battledecks to reinforce learning. In that post, Ned mentions that feedback from students suggested he use more ‘funny’ clues – again, it’s those odd and unusual ones that get people hooked.

So I’m definitely going to be thinking more carefully about the images I choose for my presentations from now on. I need to make sure that they’re not too personal (Ketel One) or only memorable because you don’t understand them (shameful kangaroo). I’m aiming for the ‘alder leaves are round’ gold-standard of mems – catchy, almost universally accessible, and pretty much unforgettable.

I’ll leave you with a mem that could double as library marketing

el libro (book): books in libraries are free, bro!!!

*If you don’t know Achewood, you should totally clear some time to go read it. But maybe not at work. Start here.

We began our affair back in the heady days of 2006, when I was a young and naive graduate trainee. You opened my eyes to the delights of information provision. I’ll never forget the buzz I got from our simplest activities together. Even adding titles to reading lists took on a magical glow. I woke up every morning with bluebirds blithely singing in my head. ‘I love libraries!’ I would think. ‘And they love me!’

We took our relationship to the next level, and I committed to library school. I was certain that I wanted to spend my whole life with you, that you were the one and only profession for me. I was filled with curiosity to find out more about you, to know everything there was to know, and with each new discovery my love grew.

My first professional post came in 2008, and I bustled around making it nice and cosy and comfortable, a place where we could be happy together. I carried on learning new things about you, and although we settled into a routine, there was always something exciting happening, something to make me think every so often ‘I love this profession!’

But, over time, things have become a little stale. Things don’t thrill me as they used to. You’re still a big, important part of my life, but something’s changed.

Librarianship, I’m cheating on you with writing.

I didn’t mean it to happen. Writing was my first love, but I thought it was just a childish crush, something that could never happen in the real world. Then we met again recently on the internet, and we just clicked.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done this, and I worry about my techniques. Am I being clumsy? Too clichéd? And will writing ever love me the way you do? But I just can’t help myself. I’m writing every day, and I could sing for the joy of it all.

I’ve tried to keep you apart. Librarianship fills my day, and writing my evenings. But I know one day you’ll collide, and I thought it was kinder to tell you now.

It’s not you, it’s me. And I would never have dared think of it without the opportunities and challenges you’ve given me. You’ve given me the strength to dream that this might be possible.

I’m not planning to commit to writing full-time. Probably never. But I felt it was only fair to let you know that you’re not number one in my heart right now. It might be a fleeting madness. I may come crawling back, looking for committee-posts to fill my fiction-less evenings. I hope that you’ll find it in your heart to forgive me.

I’ll always be interested in what you’re doing, and I honestly wish you well. I hope we can still be friends.

And we’ll always have twitter.

XOXOXO, Bethan

Clive mentioned the state of televisation in other countries, some memorable cases that have been televised, and mourned the missed opportunities of English cases past – alas, if you weren’t there in person, you’ll never get to see Jeffrey Archer squirming in the dock.

The crux of Clive’s argument was this: that what happens in a court room is a public matter, happening in a public place, and the public should be able to witness it. They should be able to see and hear the testimony, observe body language and hesitations, make up their own minds about veracity. And not just the current public – recordings of cases will allow future generations to study and observe. They would be invaluable for historians, for lawyers and students of the law, for anyone who is interested in the individual cases or the workings of the law as a whole. He mentioned the footage of the Nuremberg trials – considered non-too-important at the time, but now hugely valuable.

Questions from the audience mainly revolved around the ‘TV’ aspect. Would televising courts glamourise criminals? Would it further upset already nervous witnesses? Who would gain the advertising revenue? Would we see X-factor style ‘guilty or not?’ phone-ins? And how do you decide which cases are to be televised? How do you protect the vulnerable? One person mentioned that televising cases in New Zealand requires complex procedures that have to be agreed to by all participants before the trial begins, which can severely delay proceedings.

The question which the librarian/archivist in me was jumping up and down to ask (the actual me raised her hand politely and didn’t persist when passed over): what about the distinction between recording and broadcast? (The title of the lecture was specifically ‘TV cameras’, which indicates an emphasis on broadcast, but could have just been a shorthand for ‘video cameras’.) It’s not just broadcast that’s currently prohibited in English courts, but recording. Why not cut through the questions of which and who and how and who agrees, and just record them all?

Make recording cases the default. Give them all to The National Archives. Have them catalogued, tagged, and preserved. Keep them safe for future need, enquiry, or research. Make the recordings subject to the same data protection legislation as any other personal archive material. Then decide which (if any) are to be broadcast. If all parties agree, they can sign a data protection waiver, and Court TV, here we come.

If they don’t agree? Well, limited access could be granted on an individual basis – for instance, lawyers preparing appeals could be granted access to footage of the original trial. But the material would be there to access. We have the technology and the capacity to keep a recording of all trial proceedings – not a stenographers’s interpretation, not an artists’s impression drawn outside the court in swirly pastels, but an actual real copy of ‘this is what happened’. Won’t future generations be amazed we didn’t?

I know the ‘keep it all and decide what’s important later’ approach has archivists tearing their hair out. But storage is cheap, and loss of record, of information, of memory is potentially catastrophic. So I’m advocating for recording, for storing; for the rise of a breed of law/media librarian/archivists. We’re one of the professions that should really have a say in any decisions on this: we’re the ones who would preserve, who would allow/deny access, who would keep the recordings safe from tampering to ensure the camera doesn’t lie.

What do you say? Should we record them all, and let TNA sort them out?

Unexpected learning can be one of professional involvement’s great gifts. Here are some of the things I didn’t expect to learn in Chicago.

Success is what you make it

During conference, I did a book signing (of the New Professional’s Toolkit). Three people came.

How did you read that sentence? What tone of voice did you hear me using? Resigned, depressed, self-deprecating? I mean, three people? That’s not very many, is it?

Let’s try again:

During conference, I did a book signing (of the New Professional’s Toolkit). THREE PEOPLE CAME!!!!! #zomg #awesome #iloveyouguys

That’s what I hear in my head when I say it. I mean, three people! Three people not only bought my book – TO READ – but cared enough to come and get it signed! One of them said she’d been looking forward to the book coming out since she’d heard me mention it in a talk at the 2011 SLA Conference.

After she’d gone, I may have had a little cry.

Would it have been ace to have queues of eager fans stretching right around the hall? Well, maybe (or not – the store only had 10 copies). But I really couldn’t have felt better about it than I do. The triumph was just doing a book signing. ‘Be an author’ has been one of my ambitions for as long as I can remember, and it finally, really came home to me there, sat behind that table, that I’d done it (with a lot of help from my friends). I was published, and I didn’t give a damn how many people came to get their book signed – I’d already achieved more than I’d ever thought possible just by being there. I could have happily sat there for hours.

So, umm, yeah. That.

I hate being on panels

There. I’ve said it. I hate being on panels. I hate not being able to prepare what I’m going to say (oh, you can in a general way, but you can’t script – it’s hard to script in a way that fits the more informal discursive nature of a panel, and a pre-prepared script can’t take into account the ebb and flow of the discussion – oh, and you can guarantee someone else will nick your best points). I hate feeling like the dead weight, surrounded by supremely talented and eloquent people. I hate having to try to be intelligent, profound, and quotable off-the-cuff. I hate microphones.

But I’ll keep doing them if asked (and reassure myself that I can’t be that bad, if people keep asking me). Why? Because they’re fabulous preparation for job interviews. If you can get through a panel without facially betraying how much you’re mentally berating yourself for being a blazing idiot who has no idea when to shut up, then you’re standing yourself in good stead for facing an interview panel. If you can face 50 people and manage to come up with something (vaguely) coherent when asked about problem-solving, you can definitely do it with 5.

Admittedly, I’m not sure where ‘not accidentally strangling fellow panel members with a microphone cord’ fits into the interview scenario, but I’m sure it’s a valuable life skill.

Back yourself up

You know how you’ll be talking to someone while trying to sneak a look at their name badge, only to find out the lanyard’s twisted, and you can just see the blank back? And then you lose all chance of pretending you remembered their name from 2 years ago, and either have to admit defeat and ask or keep the conversation as non-commital as possible?

Well, take some of that burden off your fellow networkees:

Ok, full disclosure:  I didn’t actually think of this until the last day of the conference, but I’ll definitely be doing it at conferences from now on!

Immersion is key

Simon Barron‘s third blog post about SLA Chicago deals well with the feeling of total immersion you get from SLA conferences - exacerbated for the non-US contingent by literally being in a foreign country. I’ve felt like that at every previous conference, but not this time. As my hotel room was the same price whether one or two of us were sleeping in it, my husband came out with me, in preparation for a post-conference holiday.

And… it didn’t really work. I’d warned him that he wouldn’t see much of me while conference was on, and I’d mentally blocked out ‘conference’ and ‘holiday’ – but still, that one outside attachment kept me from being completely enfolded in the SLA bubble. I felt like a bit of an outsider – sure,  I’ll come along to the open house, but only till 9 because I want to dash off for dinner…

It meant I found it hard to be entirely ‘professional Bethan’ – ‘holidaying Beth’ kept trying to creep in, and remind me that there was a world outside SLA. This might seem to be a good thing (for balance and whatnot), but it actually just made it harder to feel involved and to really feel in the conference vibe. I was disconnected from the tribe.

I don’t think I’d realised how much I relied on conference to catch up with my SLA posse until this year. Not only did I have the clash of interests, I also missed some good friends and colleagues who couldn’t be there, and I think my conference experience was definitely the poorer for it. (Not that I didn’t have a fab time with the people who *were* there, but you know…) So that’s made me more determined to get along to some more SLA Europe events in person. I really believe that one of the rewards for involvement in a professional association is contact with the brilliant people you meet and work with, and that you owe it to yourself to make the most of that – so that obviously means I’ve earned more drinks with the SLA Europe folks, and deserve to put some effort into cashing (gin-ing?) that in.

So would I still have gone to Chicago if these (along with realising I need to think more about learning outcomes and learning how to edit down a presentation on the fly) had been my projected learning outcomes? For personal development, definitely! But my ‘want to learn new skills’ nerve is still twitching, and I wish I’d put a bit more effort into making sure I scratched that itch, too.

Learning/teaching

The first? That my focus at the moment is very much on learning and teaching. I like them. I came away from conference feeling a bit dissatisfied with the sessions I’d attended, and thinking that I hadn’t really learned anything. On reflection, this was untrue – I learned a lot, but rather than new skills or techniques, I learned things to tweak or enhance my existing skills and techniques. Still very valuable, but didn’t have as much as an impact on me as learning something totally new. I wanted to be able to walk away saying ‘hey, now I know how to…!’.

So that’s a good guide for me to choosing my future conferences, events, and conference sessions. If I’m craving concrete learning, then I’m not going to be satisfied with a speculative discussion panel, no matter how awesome it is. It sounds like SLA2013 is going to be more focussed on learning, too, which I think bodes well. One thing which was mentioned by fellow SLA Europe attendees Geraldine Clement-Stoneham and Sara Batts was the need for better session abstracts, telling you more about what kind of level the session would be at – is it a general introduction, or full of jargon for advanced practitioners? I do agree – I’d like to see learning outcomes mentioned in the abstract or description for each session.

This desire for learning is shaping what I want to teach, too. I want to share practical tips on how to actually do things. This might be why the blog’s been a bit sparse recently – I haven’t felt like I have any to share! But I need to remember that actually I do know how to do quite a lot of stuff, so maybe expect a few more ‘how-to’ style blog posts in the future. (or not – it could just be inherent laziness!)

This applies to my presenting, too. I’m not sure I want to talk any more about ‘the future of the profession’ – at least, not in generic and abstract terms. I want people to feel motivated and inspired, sure, but I also want them to go away with action points. One of the best pieces of feedback I got from my presentation in Chicago was someone telling me that they could actually go away and do the things I’d suggested – they were practical and implementable.

So if I’m going to demand learning outcomes from other people, I’m going to need to start using them myself. Not just for presentations, but for articles, blog posts, and maybe even tweets. I probably won’t be explicit about them, but it will be good for me to think about what people will get out of the work I’m doing. This should help make me more focussed and generally Do Better Stuff. [EDIT It occurs to me, slightly belatedly, that this exactly fits with the marketing principle of 'benefits, not features'.]

You can’t prepare for the unexpected

As mentioned in my last post, I recently presented – on purpose – without a script. One of my reflections was:

Knowing I can deliver a presentation without a script and slides is a pretty good feeling – and who knows when I might have to do it again?

Well, I had to do it again! Sort-of, anyway. I’d been asked to deliver a 30 minute presentation on ‘How to parlay your SLA experience into a new job, a promotion – even your LinkedIn profile’, about how to make the most of your SLA experience, and demonstrate what you’ve got out of it. So I dutifully prepared a set of slides and a 25 minute script – only to discover (while sitting in the audience) that there had been a misunderstanding about timings, and the first speaker was speaking for 45 minutes, not 30.

As everyone knows, finishing a session late is one of the most heinous of conference sins. No matter how interesting or engaging you might be, you need to finish that session on time – one session running over can throw off people’s timetables for the while day. Time, at a conference, is a very valuable commodity!

So I found myself having to condense a 25 minute presentation into about 17 minutes – doesn’t sound like much of a drop, but it meant I had to lose about a third. And I had to lose it while still delivering the learning, the message and – importantly – the experience. How did I do it? (apart from ‘by being fuelled with panic’?)

1) Speed up – but don’t gabble. Good delivery is important to a presentation, and when you start learning to present you’re usually told to sloooooow it right down. Speak too fast, and people won’t take in what you’re saying – and they won’t enjoy the presentation experience, either. Building a rapport with your audience takes a bit of time. It takes pauses where you make eye contact and gauge people’s reactions. If you’re short on time, this is one of the things you can strip down. Speed up your talking a bit (if you’re tripping over words, you’ve speeded up too much), and reduce some of the pauses. Make eye contact while speaking – don’t wait for pauses. Don’t leave as much impact room. This will reduce the overall experience and impact of your presentation, but means you can cut off a couple of minutes without losing any content.

2) Measure once, cut twice. Think about topic and audience. Is there a whole section you can cut? Or do you need to cut little bits from each section? Thinking about what’s on your slides can be a good guide – if you thought it important enough to put on a slide, then it’s probably important enough to keep in. But if it’s on a slide then the audience can read it – so you don’t have to! I never agree with reading out slides, but I do quite often direct people to information on the slides. This experience made me realise that that’s a waste of time, too. If you put something on a slide, people will read it.* They don’t need to be told to read it. They probably don’t need to be told how it relates to your presentation (unless you’ve put up something totally obscure, like a slide that just says ’48%’ – and even then, your audience will be able to make the leap between the question you’ve posed that requires a percentage for an answer and the figure on your slide. If they don’t they can ask you afterwards – once the clock has stopped ticking.)

I cut most of my material from the start of my presentation, mainly because I was panicking that I wouldn’t get to the end! This meant that by the time I was about two-thirds of the way through my content, I’d made up most of the time I needed, so I could ease back a bit and enjoy delivering the final section. But all through, I cut down on verbosity (it’s just possible that you may have noticed this as a tiny failing of mine). No-one was there for my deathless prose, and hopefully I’ll take that learning forward to future presentations.

This advice really comes down to: decide what your audience is there for. Are they there for the experience of hearing you speak? If so, cut down on your content, and give them the show they came for. If they’re there for your content, cut down on the show, and deliver as much of the learning as you can.

And remember – this post is panic recollected in tranquillity. I’m retro-advising based on what I think I did; or this post would have been a series of ‘Oh crap, 12 minutes. Well, I think I can cut that next example. And that paragraph can probably be condensed into a sentence. Oh crap, 11 minutes…’

Blog posts that go on too long can be just as rude as running-over at a conference session, so I’m going to follow the cool kids, and split my reflections into sections. Expect one or maybe two more blog posts on learning from the Chicago experience.

*Yes, I know this potentially creates problems for people with accessibility issues. I’d suggest that any information that is absolutely vital to your presentation be included in what you say – and if some of it needs to go on your slides too, then that’s ok. You could even consider making 2 slide decks: a more minimal one for accompanying the presentation, and a more explicit one for posting online afterwards.

Ned Potter spoke (ably and interestingly as always) about marketing your service, and especially how new professionals can get involved. His presentation is available online, and well worth taking a look at. Laura Woods has also done a great Storify of the tweets from the event.

For once, I can’t point you to a copy of my slides, or my script. I went out on a creaky, precarious limb, and off the cuff. Yes, I improvised. I was sans script, sans slides, sans everything. And it was terrifying.

I knew that the venue was going to be quite informal, and so I wanted to do something a bit less formal than my traditional ‘script & powerpoint’ show. My colleague Lisa Jeskins suggested a method she’d successfully used in a training session, where she put keywords on coloured card, distributed them to the audience, and let them drive what she was going to talk about next.

As I had 9 points under three main headings, I decided that this could work well for me, too. So, a bit of font abuse later, I had lovely cards for people to wave at me. I knew pretty much what I wanted to say for each section – but ‘pretty much’ is still a big leap of faith from my usual approach, which has every last pause, umm and err scripted.

Pictured: shameless font abuse

I made it even more of a challenge for myself by not dictating in which order I’d take the points, or even the topics. I was totally at the mercy of the audience. If they held up ‘congruent’, and I had to talk for about 3 minutes on ‘being congruent’, no matter how well (or otherwise) that followed on from the point before, or resonated with the point after.

It was tough – not only not knowing exactly what I was going to say, but not knowing what order I’d be saying it in! Not being able to structure an argument that flowed from one point to another. Not being able to make a general point early on and then plan on referring back to it. Switching without warning from motive to medium to message and back again. It was also tough to get the timing right – not just coming in under the total time, but trying to give each point reasonably equal weighting within that time.

But tough is good. I’m getting quite practised at presentations, but they’re all the same sort sort of presentations – write a script, put together some pretty slides, practice, and deliver. That’s not to say I’m perfect at those kind of presentations (far from it!), but it’s good to try a new method, have a new challenge. Knowing I can deliver a presentation without a script and slides is a pretty good feeling – and who knows when I might have to do it again?

And I think it’s good for me to let go of control occasionally. I don’t just get worried by not knowing in advance what I’m going to say, but also by not knowing now what I did say. Oh, I can remember some of it, but a lot of it has passed into the sort of adrenaline-fuelled haze that has you waking up at 2am in a panic of ‘did I really say…?!?’. But that’s ok. No-one else there will remember every word I said, so why do I need to? I like to carefully plan my presentations so that every word counts, but no-one actually takes in every word you say. Listening is hard work! And some things will get missed – that’s natural. So why worry that not all of my sentences were beautifully crafted, my examples perfectly apt, or my metaphors understatedly elegant? It’s not a speech. It’s not going down in the history books. As long as people took away the main points I wanted to make, and enjoyed themselves, then that’s just fine.

And we made sure they got our main points! In a fit of pure genius (or pure evil, depending on which side of the mic you were on…) we introduced battledeck-summarising!

Taking its inspiration from battledecks, Ned and I each produced 18 slides with words and pictures illustrating our main points, and asked for two brave volunteers to come and fight it out!  Katie P. (@boundtounravel) and Laura Williams (@theatregrad) courageously stepped forward, and did a fab job! Laura summarised many of my points better than I’d said them in the first place, and proved she’d be an excellent ‘Catchphrase‘ contestant…

Here’s what Laura was faced with:

I hope Laura and Katie had as much fun doing the battledecks as we did watching them! It really rounded off a good, fun evening – and I’m glad I got in the spirit of things, and bared my scriptless soul.