OLA SuperConference 2019 Abridged Reflections Part 1 - "The Quiet Day"

I have attended the Ontario Library SuperConference for a very long time. I first presented there in 2000 and if the records in my photo albums, on my wiki and my blog are correct, the only times I have not attended the #OLASC after that date were in 2002, 2006, and last year, 2018. (Technically, last year I was present at the Super Conference Planners meeting but spent too much money at AASL to be able to afford going to both AASL and OLA.)

My favourite photo taken of me at OLASC
Credit to photographer Anita Brooks-Kirkland
Me and my partner in crime, Alanna King

It is traditional for me to write my reflections on my blog, summarizing sessions, highlighting key points and revealing my "so what" next steps. I don't think I can give my "report" in quite the same way for 2019. Experiencing the conference from the point of view of a planner, like some of my wonderful OSLA planners before me (Alanna King, Jess Longthorne, Sarah Oesch, Joel Krentz, Lauren Flattery, and many others) is a completely different experience. It is both more and less - more altruistic, less self-centered; more sessions to check in on and ensure things are going smoothly for all attendees, less workshops to personally attend for a significant length of time. Some observations should only be shared with our SuperConference Planning Team, as they are behind-the-scenes deliberations that are not meant to be negative but serve to improve next year's conference. I think that this year, instead of my regular structure, I'll provide "snapshots" and some abridged reflections of the event.

ETA: As I began to write, I realized that there was NO way it would all fit into one post. Therefore, I'm creating three separate blog posts. Day 1 is subtitled "The Quiet Day" because I was told that Wednesday, the first day, is the quietest of the three days of SuperConference. You may disagree after reading about what took place.


Tuesday, January 29, 2019
4:00 pm
After trying unsuccessfully to carry all my luggage to the bus stop, I gave up and drove downtown. Driving downtown was a dream! I was parked and in my hotel room before 5:00 pm!
It's very important to like and work well with your division co-planner. My co-planner was the incomparable Alanna King. Tuesday evening prior to the 6:00 pm on-site All-Planners meeting was the first of many times that Alanna and I sat down to ensure we were organized and prepared. We also did wellness checks on each other. Dinner in "The Vault" at The Loose Moose was lovely! (Alanna, that was Tuesday, right?)



Wednesday, January 30, 2019
8:00 am
We were lucky to have Stephen Hurley from VoicEd Radio come to the conference to live stream and record for later broadcast several of the sessions. We met early in the morning to give him a tour of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre and guarantee that he knew where to find the first presentation he was scheduled to record, a 9:00 am talk called Diversity at Your Library: Effective Strategies, Best Practices, and Lessons Learnt by Nadia Caiki, Andrea Cecchetta, and Louise Reimer. I worked the front desk, helping wonderful people like the 2018 OLBA President Mariam Hamou alongside library school volunteers assembling lanyards.

Wednesday, January 30, 2019
10:30 am
Jess Longthorne and Jacquie Raycraft from the Simcoe County District School Board gave a great talk called Using the Outdoors to Power Up Your Library Learning Commons. It was well attended (43 people squeezed into the room) and I know my next step is to learn from Jess how to do an outdoor story walk (and get access to her slide deck). That would be a perfect fit for my Platinum Eco-School!

Alanna took care of two other OSLA sponsored sessions at this time: Finding Your Voice:Engaging with the OLA Advocacy Toolkit (Dawn Telfer and Jesse Carliner) and Phenomenal Learning for Young Learners and Activists (Greg Harris, Stephanie Tosh, Jamie Taylor and Alicia Dart Shaw). I got some great photos from Sarah Oesch's session, called EmPowering Our Youngest People: Storytime Sessions as a Transitional Tool for Pre-JK Students and Their Families. Our friend Jennifer Casa-Todd did a great job with her session, Virtual Reality and Your Library Learning Commons that started at 11:20 am.

Wednesday, January 30, 2019
1:00 pm

We could really use one of Hermione Granger's time-turners during the SuperConference. Thanks to Alanna's simple but sufficient lunch she pre-packed and stored in her room, we were able to claw back some time that eating would, pardon the pun, eat up. Still, there's never enough time in the day. I would have loved to been a fly on the wall at the OLITA Technology spotlight to hear Dr. Safiya Noble speak. (She wrote the book that my AML friends have frequently referenced, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.) Alanna was able to squeeze in some time to see the Careers Spotlight speaker, Melissa Nightingale (author of How F*cked Up Is Your Management? An Uncomfortable Conversation About Modern Leadership) at 9:00 am and she liked it. I needed to be at my friend Lisa Noble's talk called Organizing Your Digital Closet: The What, Why and How of Curation. Heavens knows I need some better curation systems for my personal life. Lisa's introductory activity taught me that I'm not a totally lost cause; I do have some curator tendencies, but choosing the right tool will help keep, sort, and organize information more effectively. I plan on trying out Diigo, Symbaloo, and/or Wakelet. Lisa's URL for her talk is bit.ly/OLAcloset. Simultaneously, Alanna took care of the needs of the popular talk by Jennifer Thiessen, Colleen MacKinnon, and Amanda Pemberton, Beyond CRAAP: Critical Thinking in the Age of Fake News.

Wednesday, January 30, 2019
 2:30 pm

All OLA conference sessions are assigned a convenor that is meant to assist the presenters with whatever needs they might have prior to their session. Convenors introduce the presenters, read scripted announcements that are required to be shared, and other duties. My friend Ruth Gretsinger convened this very well-attended talk by David Zambrano, Christopher Su, and Kate Wetmore (employees of the Markham Public Library) called Transforming Your Library into a STEAM Learning Hub Through Camps. I was glad to be around, because this dynamic crew had a lot of things they brought for their participants to explore. These photos are just a small portion of the shots I took - and these are just ones with no faces included. At the same time, Alanna was supporting the talk Mind the Gap! Information Literacy Challenges, Needs and Opportunities for Students' Transition from High School to University / College  by Kate Johnson-McGregor, Sarah Shujah, Sophie Bury, Samhita Gupta and Christopher Tomansini. The Indigenous Spotlight speaker, Tanya Talaga, was also sharing.


Wednesday, January 30, 2019
4:00 pm

Keynotes are sessions that are deemed to be of interest to all OLA conference attendees. As such, nothing is scheduled at the same time as the keynotes, and there are only three keynotes, one per day. Our Wednesday keynote, at 4:00 pm was Micah White, activist, educator, author and the co-creator of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It was a good talk and it challenged some of our assumptions about activism. He provided an illuminating allegory about pigeons in a research study. One received food every time it pecked a lever. The second received food every second time. The third received food at random intervals. At some point, the researchers disabled the lever's connection to food. The first and second pigeons stopped pecking the lever after a try or two. The third pigeon never stopped pecking. Micah said we have to stop acting like the third pigeon, using the same strategy in the vain hope that things will change. He said that despite all the environmental activism of the past 30 years, we are in dire straits and we need to change our approach.

The interesting part of being a planner is that we are actually scheduled to attend socials and our job is to have a good time and make sure others are having a good time. Our All-Conference Welcome Party started at 5:30 pm. The theme was "Dragged Out of the 90s" to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the OLA SuperConference. As such, we had many things that linked to the past. (I got to see my friend Jessica who had some Rubik Cubes for people to play.) The centerpiece was a performance by two talented drag queens, who lip-synched to some 1990s classic stars, like Britney Spears, old-school Beyonce, and the Spice Girls.