I traveled to two international conferences consecutively last week, which was hectic but rewarding. The first conference I attended was the the 2019 Asian Conference on Education and International Development, where I presented my research on how public libraries provide programs to help mitigate summer learning loss among k-12 students (see slides below). This was my second time going to a conference on education, and I really enjoyed all the pedagogical innovations shared by the presenters. Particularly the use of gamification in classroom was intriguing – I have begun to think, in online classes, how could I apply elements of game playing to motivate and engage students?
My second conference was the Design Thinking Global Workshop organized by Guangzhou Library in China, where Chinese public librarians met with Design Thinking experts from Aarhus Library in Denmark, Chicago Public Library and Singapore National Library and experienced the application of Design Thinking in library service/program development. I gave a presentation (in Chinese) on impact assessment and discussed the basic process of measuring the impact of a project (see slides below)- after all, once the library implements a project using the Design Thinking approach, they won’t know how well the project is doing, or how impactful the project is, until proper assessment is conducted.
After the whirlwind of the past week, I’m just glad that it’s spring break this week so I can breathe a bit while catching up on work!
Formalized Curiosity 