Clear Blue Dei

My husband Sean Robinson and Kay Gregg from the Allen County Public Library presented at IOLUG 2007 (Indiana Online Users Group) down at Indianapolis last Friday. Kay did a poster session on YouTube and Sean did a really fun talk on Learning 2.0 – Transforming Your Organization Through Learning. He is a really exciting and fun speaker (if I do say so myself) and everyone really enjoyed his presentation. He has a great way of challenging and exciting people and doing it in a fun way.

The first thing he did was to pass out a License to Play card to everyone (he and Kay created it and were inspired by the 2007 License to Play poster from Lee County Public Library) that they signed and put in their wallet. He said if anyone questioned why they were having fun or if they felt guilty about having fun, they could say “We have a License to Play!”

The theme of his talk was about the three legs of Learning 2.0 – Work, Play and Risk. He said that Learning 2.0 was about exploration and discovery. And it was not just learning, but transforming your organization.

He demonstrated these by some really fun activities. First he asked who was a real risk-taker. No one held up their hand. So he asked again and one person held up their hand. Then he gave that person a Library Genius 2.0 t-shirt (that he and Kay designed). Everyone oohed and wanted one too. The lesson? “With risk comes reward”.

They also played Romance Roulette. He asked for an audience member who would take a risk. He got a volunteer and then they had to open a romance novel and read a passage out loud, not knowing what it would say. But before the volunteer read, Sean said he would read first. The lesson here was “Don’t ask people to do things you are not prepared to do”.

Also, before the talk, Kay taped a starbucks coffee card under one of the seats. Sean said everyone should look under their seats to see if they had it. So everyone got up and looked under their chairs to see if they had the card. The lesson here? “The right incentive will get a whole group off their butts ”.

Of course, he had many great things to say, but I loved these activities and I think they illustrated his points and made his talk fun. He talked about Learning 2.0 and how it is not just learning, but transforming your organization. He ended with “we are nothing special and if we can do it, so can you”.

Here is a picture of Sean from his presentation – “it’s not a surge, but an avalanche”

And here is Kay at her IOLUG 2007 poster session:

Here are more pictures that Kay took.

Take a risk! Work! Play! Explore and discover and get excited.

~Susan Mellott

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