Speakers
Opening General Session: Thursday, November 6, 2014, 1:00 pm
Playing to Learn: A Maker's Perspective
AnnMarie Thomas, Engineering Professor, University of St. Thomas
What role does play have in learning? What makes a maker a maker? The growth of the Maker Movement gives us an opportunity to rethink the role the places and ways in which learners of all age explore their interests.
AnnMarie Thomas is an engineering professor who spends her time trying to encourage the next generation of makers and engineers.
Check out AnnMarie's fun Ted Talk on Play-Doh based squishy circuits.
Friday General Session: Friday November 7, 2013, 9:00 am
Thinking about technology ... differently
Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President, OCLC Research and Chief Strategist
Our view of 'technology’ tends to focus on particular systems – the discovery layer, the ILS, the repository, FaceBook. However, as researchers and learners are increasingly 'enacting’ their practices in technology mediated environments it means we need to take a more inclusive view of technology. It is not something separate from behaviors; it is deeply entangled with them. This means that we need to design and implement services in a different way, mindful of the environment into which they must fit.
This presentation will give some examples of what this means in practice and of how libraries are responding. The discussion will focus on research and learning workflows, discovery, research information management, and linked data.
Lorcan Dempsey oversees the research division and participates in planning at OCLC. He is a librarian who has worked for library and educational organizations in Ireland, England and the US.
Lorcan has policy, research and service development experience, mostly in the area of networked information and digital libraries. He writes and speaks extensively, and can be followed on the web at Lorcan Dempsey's weblog and on twitter. Before moving to OCLC Lorcan worked for JISC in the UK, overseeing national information programs and services, and before that was Director of UKOLN a national UK research and policy unit at the University of Bath. Lorcan is Irish, and before moving to the UK he worked in public libraries in Dublin, Ireland.