General information

LITA Education Committee Midwinter 2009 Report

We will be posting our full minutes on the LITA Wiki in a bit. Mandy Havert and I wanted to share a brief summary of the Education committee’s work at Midwinter.

Important stuff first – we are pursuing speakers for educational programming opportunities (i.e Regional Institutes, ALA Programs, Preconferences, and online course/webinar/tutorial/etc. development). The following topics were identified as top priorities (from liaison reports with LITA IGs/Committees and a survey done 18 months ago).
Open Source
Mobile Tech
RDA
Extensible Catalog
SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
Semantic Web

If you are interest in working with us to develop an educational program in one of these areas, please contact the chairs:
David Ward dh-ward@illinois.edu
Mandy Havert mhavert@nd.edu

You’ll notice some similarities with what is going on at LITA Forum and other LITA activities – one of our goals is to look for ways to take popular/well rated topics/speakers/programs and develop additional educational programming based on them. For example, developing an online course or tutorial based on a popular ALA program or preconference.

Now the more reporty stuff:
LITA Education combined with Regional Institutes in the past year. We spend from Annual 08-Midwinter 09 reviewing our charge and creating organizational documents to track help guide the newly combined committee’s role. Part of this involved assigning committee members as liaisons to all LITA IGs/Committees to gather information on possible educational programming opportunities, including Regional Institutes, Programs/Preconferences at Annual, Midwinter opportunities, and online webinar/tutorial/course planning. At Midwinter we reviewed liaison reports and decided on the following topics to pursue programming for over the next year: Open Source, Mobile Tech, RDA, Extensible Catalog ,SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), and the Semantic Web. Additionally, we are going to work with LITA Forum committee, Top Tech Trends, PPC, and others to pursue other topics and speakers as opportunities arise. In particular, we are going to look at ways to build additional educational programming from successful programs and events from other LITA committees.

–David Ward, on behalf of the LITA Education Committee