LILAC Conference 2010 : discussion in Second Life

Jo Parker, my co-editor has just passed this through to me :

I went to Sheila Webber's InfoLit School SecondLife session yesterday
where a few of us gathered to talk about the recent LILAC conference,
the main UK conference on IL, held in Ireland last month. Sheila
(Sheila Yoshikawa in SL) introduced our speakers, 'Pancha Enzyme' and
'Ishbel Hartmann', and with a mix of text chat and voice they
presented some of the highlights from the conference, including an
overview of the pecha kucha technique (20 powerpoint slides of 20
seconds duration each ‑ no mean feat; we agreed that it would be
useful for getting a powerful message across though less good for
audience participation); Geoff Walton's work 'demolishing' the Sconul
7 pillars model of IL; and a research project (Stephanie Rosenblatt)
looking at the impact of IL interventions on the quality of student
bibliographies. The work being undertaken in Newcastle's public
libraries was also mentioned (I remember the tweets about this at the
time, people were very excited), along with Edinburgh's support for
students in SL (via the 'IS cream van'), and the use of QR codes on
mobiles phones to support IL.

The session lasted about an hour and I took away lots of new and
useful stuff to follow up. Sheila provided SL 'notecards' with the
links, and also a very fetching LILAC t shirt for our avatars to wear!
When we did a quick check, there were participants from the US,
Australia and the UK ‑ so if you get the timing right, you probably
get as good a spread of people as you would at a f2f conference.
Sheila usually makes a transcript of the events available, so look out
for that.

The next session is in a couple of weeks, when John Kirriemuir, who
wrote the gaming chapter in the book, will be talking about SL in
education.
I am not a regular visitor to SL (I haven't entirely mastered sitting
down, and 'flying' successfully is completely beyond me!) but there is
something strangely compelling about the environment. I'm 'Isla
Darwinian', by the way, in SL, so do introduce yourself if we bump
into each other!