Share your adventures here!
Share short or long reflections from different points of your travel experience.
- your feelings
- what you observed
- what you noticed overall about the library, program, people, community
Sharing my recent travel to NYC STEM Information Mini Conference as a model. (It’s not great that I only have one example here, but here’s some ways to touch on the points above)
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Preparation
For the STEM Information Mini Conference (by Metro and Barnard College), I signed up and was accepted to share PLIX Data Gems, touching on data science literacies and sharing the creative learning pedagogy. In preparation, I made 7 travel kits to bring with me. After all the materials arrived, the kits took me about 3 hours to assemble. I added some stickers and letters to label the boxes!
Travel
New York is not too far from Boston, so I took an inter-city bus. I packed 3 small bags, a backpack with my clothes and toiletries, my purse, and a tote bag with the travel kits and a bunch of Data Gems zines. After getting to the hotel, I was really hungry, and there were too many food options nearby to decide on. I finally went to a place a few minutes away that had some simple Thai food (I like to eat healthy and the numerous fried chicken places nearby were so tempting, but I knew my body would not feel great afterwards). After eating, I went back to the hotel and felt really exhausted, so I took a nap that ended up being 6 hours! So my sleep schedule was off the whole time. Yikes.
Conference
It’s a small conference, under 50 people, with about 30 or so joining virtually. I discovered that most of the attendees were academic librarians, and it was fascinating to hear about the celebrations and challenges in that area. I took a bunch of notes on my iPad. (There was also fire alarm testing both days, and we all got through that!) Topics ranged from accidentally becoming a STEM librarian, accidentally becoming an expert on generative AI, ways to work with university faculty to support student assignments and research work, comics for science communication, and so much more. It’s glorious.
Data Gems
During my session, I presented about creative learning and how that informed the design of this activity, and left a variety of example projects on the screen for people to look at.
Photo credit: Brian Sawyer
I went around to check on people and see if anyone needed help with the folding scissors in the kit. (They all figured it out!) At the tables, people were really engaged, thinking about what they wanted to have on their wearable data tracker. Some people decided to track their weight-lifting, some created a tracker to remind themselves to rest their eyes every hour, after continuously looking at a screen, or just to take a walk. There was even one limiting the frequency of feeding their cat. No more falling into that trap of “no you haven’t fed me at all today” look!
Photo credit: Brian Sawyer
I also got a short tour of the Barnard College Library. They have a large zine collection! I’m obsessed and fascinated by the different permutations of zines.
