first planning meetups for online journal club

ebl, professional stuff 2 Responses »
Feb 242012

Thanks to everyone who responded to the survey and expressed interest in attending a meetup to chat about an online journal club.

To accommodate as many people as possible, there will be two meetups:

  • Tuesday 6 March at 6pm AEST (Brisbane)
  • Wednesday 7 March at 7pm AEST (Brisbane)

Because I’m more than a little ditsy, I managed to get on of the dates wrong on the survey. A number of you indicated you could make Tuesday 7 March at 7pm, but of course, 7 March is a Wednesday. So hopefully this will work out for some people.

If you can’t make these dates and times, never fear! We’ll take lots of notes and there’ll be opportunities to volunteer to help out down the track, as well as opportunities to participate in the journal club itself.

I’ll post a short agenda closer to the meeting.

We’ll use Skype for this first call, as that was by far the most popular option.

If you’re planning on coming along to one of the meetups, please indicate which one by choosing an option on the form below, and also enter your Skype username so I can be sure to add you to the correct call.

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let's get this professional reading group off the ground!

ebl, professional stuff No Responses »
Feb 182012

If you’re interested in participating in an online professional reading group, please fill out this questionnaire about your availability for a bit of a planning meeting, and we’ll see where we end up!

Please respond by 5pm AEST (Brisbane) on Thursday 23 February, so I can confirm a time the following day.

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interested in participating in an online professional reading group?

ebl, professional stuff 22 Responses »
Feb 142012

Last Friday, one of the breakout sessions at LibraryCamp Australia focused on professional reading and we chatted about the possibility of setting up an online ‘journal club’. This is something I’d love to participate in and I’m definitely keen to help out with some of the mechanics of getting something off the ground, but I don’t really have the capacity to take on a huge amount of work. So it would really be a case of a few of us getting together and seeing what we could come up with. I thought I’d blog about this and see if we can generate some interest, and then we can go from there.

What I had in mind was something like this…

  • We establish some shared topics of interest in the literature – some topics that a whole bunch of us across the sectors are interested in – and work with these as reading topics. Alternatively, we could have sector-based groups, but I do see a lot of value in cross-pollinating and reading literatures related to other sectors, as well as our own.
  • Each month, we choose one academic reading (or one academic reading per topic, if we want to break into groups).
  • Once a month, we get together in an online space like a Google+ Hangout and discuss that reading. As journal club discussions work best with medium sized groups, I would suggest this happens more than once a month, at various times. Individuals can nominate to lead the discussion, say once a year each.
  • On an ongoing basis, we could all share information about other professional reading we’re doing – including ‘non-academic’ literature, like blog posts or news articles. This could be done via Twitter with a hash tag, or we could consider setting up a WordPress site and use BuddyPress to turn it into a social network where we can share our reading.

This might be something we do just for this year, the National Year of Reading, to profile professional reading, or it could be something that continues into the future.

Ultimately, this should be a lightweight initiative. I’m sure none of us want to get bogged down in administrivia and extra work.

Is anyone interested in joining me in a Google+ Hangout in the next two weeks or so to talk this through further?

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