Almost Home

Sitting in the airport in Charlotte, NC, which gets my vote as one of the world's Civilized Airports because it has free wireless (Tallahassee, FL and Richmond, VA are two other Civilized Airports.) Airports without free wireless are useless, bleak, forsaken places.

It's been a long week at the Library Research Seminar IV conference in London, Ontario, Canada. Both on the way out and coming back I had to be up at 3am to start a long day of travel. I packed wearily and in a hurry at midnight...never do that. At the conference on Thursday 10/11, my presentation was on the geography of virtual questioning - GIS mapping of chat questions asked of Florida's statewide Ask a Question service.

Classwise - the wiki paper is due 10/15 and links are up for posting; if any links go south, you can put in your own by clicking the 'chainlink' button and using NameInfoev as your wikipage link text (e.g. MonicaInfoenv) and then the clickable text itself can be your name. I think I accidentally deleted a couple of students' names at some point when I was making a correction to the list, but they should be back now.

Connectivity was iffy at the LRS-IV conference so I thought it best to cancel the live class for Week 7 (since we've put up with enough tech hassles already); actually this was a big problem at the conference hotel that so many LIS educators were needing to get access to their class web sites and couldn't because of some glitch with the hotel's wireless. Which is why I tend to avoid staying in conference hotels - pick some cheaper place nearby and you'll likely have better and free or cheap Internet rather than paying an arm and leg for little or no Internet access. You can have your mint on the pillow, I'll take the free wireless.

We'll pick it all back up in next week's class, discussing more about why Karen Schneider says that "the user is not broken" as well as issues of anonymity, privacy, roles and move into teaching and learning in the virtual reference interaction; and then I fly right out again to ASIS&T Conference in Milwaukee. My plane will arrive too late for my favorite SIG's session on Saturday, but I'll participate in Internet Public Library meetings and I also have two posters in the conference (morning and afternoon poster sessions). One poster is on the GIS mapping of virtual questions, the other on a study of how LIS graduate students and informatics undergraduate students perceived the role of librarians in handling questions about Web 2.0. After ASIS&T, hoping to be able to stay in Tallahassee and avoid all further travel until the Xmas holiday. Since all of Xmas and New Year 2006/2007 was spent in the hospital and dealing with crisis, really hoping in 2007/2008 for the happy time we didn't get last year.