Tag Archives: AMICAL

AMICAL 2015

This is a little late, but better late than never?

I was lucky enough to be invited to give a workshop at the 2015 conference for the AMICAL Consortium.  AMICAL is a consortium that serves librarians, faculty and technologists who teach and work at American international liberal arts institutions (like the American University of Cairo, of Nigeria, of Paris, of Afghanistan, and so on).  This year, it was hosted by the American University of Bulgaria, which is located in Blagoevgrad, about an hour south of Sofia.

a quickly moving small river, with trees on both banks and a bridge in the distance

View from city center, Blagoevgrad

I can honestly say that I have never been so well treated by confernece organizers.  They were kind enough to allow me to come in a couple of days early to manage the jet lag (Bulgaria is ten time zones away) so I flew into Sofia and stayed there overnight, instead of moving on directly to Blagoevgrad.  In Sofia, I met up with another attendee, Lori Townsend from the University of New Mexico who you may know as the librarian who first introduced threshold concepts into the library literature — a topic that has come back to the forefront as part of the new ACRL Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education.  Lori and I spent some time walking around Sofia before making the trek to the conference site.

This was the view from my hotel —

Hotel room view — the plaza in front of the National Palace of Culture

We saw a lot of extremely old churches — the coolest one had an archaeological level dating back to the 3rd century below an actual, working church — but I wasn’t allowed to take photos there.  This is The Rotunda St. George, which dates back to the 4th century

It is believed that this is the oldest building in Sofia

There are also miles and miles of public parks — some all manicured and park-like, and others foresty and wild, like this one –

a gravel path leading away through a green forest

After a day of walking around Sofia, we arrived in Blagoevgrad for the conference.  My workshop was scheduled on the first day, before the opening keynote.  If you can arrange that kind of schedule for yourself – I HIGHLY recommend it.  Finishing with all of your responsibilities before the conference actually starts makes for an extremely enjoyable conference!

My workshop was in two parts — the first part was about developing good research assignments, and the barriers that students face when they’re handed badly designed assignments.  The room was jam-packed full, which made for a great atmosphere, but which made it difficult to get around to all of the students!

A white classroom full of students, sitting in small groups at individual tables

Information Literacy workshop, part 1 – AMICAL 2015

About 2/3 of the attendees stayed for the second part of the workshop – which focused on curiosity and imagination.  I’ll admit it — this part was more fun!

One of the great surprises of this experience happened at the beginning of the workshop, when I was introduced by one of the conference facilitators — who turned out to be one of my library school professors, Rebecca Miller. She’s now the Head of the library at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul!

a small group of librarians discussing research assignments.  A red arrow  is pointing at a young woman with brown hair and a black shirt.

Dr. Rebecca Miller, The American University of Afghanistan

Once my talk was over, I got to sit back and enjoy the rest of the conference.  The opening keynote from Lori Townsend was great — and did a really good job of highlighting the barriers I had described in my workshop.  The closing keynote was from Nancy Fried Foster, who reported on some new research that she’s done looking at the research habits of faculty.  Nancy has been to five (!) AMICAL conferences now, and has also done site visits at several AMICAL campuses, helping libraries around the world use ethnography to inform their space decisions.

In some ways, I think that it would have worked better for my workshop to happen at the end of the conference — Lori and Nancy did such a good job making the case for doing the work I was advocating for in my workshop, that I think it would have been a really effective progression.  One thing I didn’t realize before attending the conference was just how recently some of these campuses have started working on information literacy as a goal.  Some, like the American University of Cairo have been doing library instruction for decades now — but others have programs that have launched in the last couple of years!  I think i could have done a better job bridging those gaps.

The rest of the conference was a variety of shorter papers and talks where faculty and librarians shared case studies about the work on their campuses.  I got to meet some amazing educators — like Gohar Stepanyan, who teaches finance in Armenia, and who conducted one of the more interesting studies of student resource use that I’ve seen. Anguelina Popova is Bulgarian, but she runs the center for teaching excellence at the American University of Central Asia AND she’s pursuing a PhD from the Open University of the Netherlands!  She’s doing some amazing work in information and digital literacy, almost exactly on the other side of the world from us (and she also helped me navigate traditional Bulgarian cuisine). And Joyce Rafla has an extremely interesting job supporting pedagogy at the American University of Cairo — and is a definite kindred spirit when it comes to research assignment design!

This is just the tip of the iceberg — notes and summaries from all of the conference sessions are available at the AMICAL blog.  This is a fascinating organization and a really effective conference.  Highly recommended!