Monday 10 September 2018

LibraryCampCamp has finished

Handwritted note saying: Really great time at library camp camp, met some inspiring people, had some excellent talks, and picked up some good ideas. Would recommend to anyone.
It's Monday as I write this, after the weekend of #LibraryCampCamp, a new library learning festival. Thank you so much to the Information Literacy Group of CILIP for sponsoring it, and the attendees for their engagement and participation that made it work.

We made draft zines (on reading for pleasure and on play (they do need tweaking before they could be printed / distributed!), manually tweeted, chatted about lots of interesting and library related things, tried new teaching ideas out, played games, made fire, and explored the gorgeous site.

At some point soon I'll think about whether we run it again (we collected ideas for future events!) and what that event will look like... but for now I hope people enjoy seeing some of the content we created under the links above.

Look for another iteration of the festival in 2019 if we can manage to organise something...

Thursday 6 September 2018

Permission to play research interviews

Set of goodies from the CounterPlay conference including mask and chatterbox
I've been thinking about the idea of "permission to play" a lot recently, putting some of those early thoughts into a paper for the HEaD conference.

More recently I've been interviewing people who use play with adults about how they use play, trying to dig a little into how they enable people to play, or help to give "permission to play" to them. I've talked to a series of fascination people (15 of them?) and it's been brilliant hearing the amazing range of things happening and the different approaches that people take. It's also wonderful how generous they've been in offering up their time to talk about these things - the play community is full of great people.

As soon as possible I'll be transcribing, analysing, and generally puzzling over all the stuff that people told me about and trying to work it into a journal article (or a short book if I think I can justify it).  I'm sure I'll present it to at least one conference as well, though not 100% sure where (except perhaps Counterplay).

So thank you to everyone I interviewed and watch out for outputs at some point in 2019!