Masie Learning 2014 Conference

This is the best conference I attend all year because it's saturated with ideas and people and workshops that are all about empowering others through learning: online learning, classroom learning, micro-learning, flipped learning, etc. Although the conference doesn't officially start till this evening, I've already gotten a few ideas for my vision of the library of the future. 

In my vision, library staff will be their own staff development coordinators because in the future, their personal and professional growth will be priority number one within their organizations and it will be priority number one within themselves. They will have their own staff development budgets and they will have dedicated learning time scheduled into their days and their learning goals will be tied to and monitored regularly through the use of social media or blogs, etc (annual reviews are not enough). 

My hypothesis is that the more library staff are empowered and encouraged and required to 1) self identify their learning needs - both personal and professional, and 2) to identify ways to meet and exceed those needs by being aware of how they best learn new things, then they will be more likely to empower and encourage library customers to do the same for themselves. 

Instead of being a purely quantitative process, certification will be based on demonstration of learning. In other words, it will be a more qualitative process with the staff leading workshops that teach others what they learned because nothing says, "I know how to do/be ______" better than being able to teach someone else how to do/be ________." Instead of counting how many workshops staff attend, we will instead count the number of workshops they facilitate/teach/lead or on a smaller scale, we will count the number of times they teach a customer how to do something new like how to set up a gmail account or how to use a library database. The details still need to be worked out for this section but you get the idea. At any rate, certification should be granted when you can show that you are a different person than you were five years ago, and that you pushed your profession or your library to evolve in some way. 

Just some thoughts as I begin to immerse myself in learning at Masie's Learning 2014 conference.