Conference Photos

Elizabeth Burge, Keynote Speaker

Saturday, May 10th, 9-10:15 a.m. [Ballroom C/D]

How we reflect links to how we travel: Some lateral views of challenging professional landscapes.

Being creatively and critically reflective about professional experience, underlying values and client relevance depends upon various directions of looking. We'll explore those ways while assessing various tools to help us unearth our assumptions about our professional worth and our stories of professional practice (as Betsy Baker recommends). Since part of that landscape involves perceived and actual partnerships between clients and librarians, I'll offer you some concerns about librarians' presence and functions from my part of the field (trying to limit my metaphorical thinking along the way) and use a short creative thinking exercise to provoke some reflections for participant discussion.

Dr Liz Burge is an adult educator with experience since 1978 in various forms of distance education in various international settings. While teaching in the graduate program at the Faculty of Education at the University of New Brunswick in Atlantic Canada, she tries to provoke her own and others' reflective thinking (analytical as well as metaphorical) about why and how technologies fit into complex learning contexts. Having been an Australian librarian for a first career, Liz remains concerned about the level of operational links between librarians and educators. Her conference session will help us take a reflective trip into our practice, using a metaphorical exercise to examine some assumptions about our own and our clients' learning. More detail about her research and publications can be found at http://www.unbf.ca/education/welcome/people/burge.html.

Further reading: Inside-out Thinking about Distance Teaching: Making Sense of Reflective Practice. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 47(11) (1996): 843-848.