I attended the 2018 Asian Conference on Education and International Development (ACEID) last week, and it was my first time attending a conference outside of LIS. The majority of the conference participants (from over 40 countries) were from education, and their presentations covered a wide range of education related topics. My presentation was about how librarians and faculty collaborate in higher education, and it was scheduled in a session along with two other presentations focusing on higher ed. Unfortunately, not many people showed up in the audience – the concurrent sessions on K-12 issues outcompeted us. Still, I had a nice discussion with the small audience – before I presented my study, I showed them slides of librarian stereotypes and their true images (e.g. portraits of the book “This is What a Librarian Looks Like”, the New Zealand librarians cosplaying the Kardasians, and examples of the cool things that librarians made happen in the library), and the audience was quite impressed. They agreed that my presentation gave them good ideas of how to reach out to their librarians for help now that they know libraries are such an important component of the learning ecology in higher ed.
I had much fun interacting with education researchers at the conference and learned a lot myself. There’s a even research about how PMS (pre-menstrual syndrome) affects middle school girls’ academic performance in school. How interesting.
The conference took place in Kobe Japan during the beautiful cherry blossoms, and there were lines of cherry trees right outside of the conference venue, so I got to witness the fleeting and delicate beauty that has such significant cultural symbolism in Japan. It was indeed quite a sight!
Formalized Curiosity 