CRITIQUE ON THE JULY 16, 2008 FORUM

The Ortigas Center Library Consortium (OCLC) Inc. sponsored a forum on “Strategies in Effective Searching of Information” last July 16, 2008 conducted by Dr. Angelina P. Resurreccion of the Rizal Technological University.

It was a rainy Wednesday and I have to hurriedly leave the office at 12:30pm to be on time for the 1pm forum at JRU. It is my first forum in relation to the new course that I am taking, Library and Information Science. I was very excited, my expectations were high since this forum was recommended / required by Ma’am Sharon for her LIS 260 class to attend.

When I entered the venue I was grateful that the class of Ms. Sharon was seated near each other.

The forum started at 1:45pm with the usual opening remarks and the long introduction of the lecturer. Finally, Dr. Resurreccion started the forum. I was taking down notes since we were told to prepare a report on the forum and when the speaker noticed how hurriedly some of the audience was trying to write down all the points that she was making. She then said that her power point presentation is available in CD for P50.00. She went thru her power point presentation with out elaborating on some of the concepts that she was presenting.

I was seated beside Ron, and I asked her about some of the topics (like pathfinder and web harvesting) that were presented. Ron was able to give me a clearer idea of what was presented using layman’s term.

Dr. Resurreccion also mentioned that they started in their school the Information Literacy Program, but when one of the audience asked how can they access the effectiveness of the program, she was not able to give a concrete reply.

Overall, it was a rather disappointing forum. Maybe Ms. Sharon also felt this way because she changed her instruction to us to make a critique on the forum. Or maybe I was just expecting too much after being introduced to Web 2.0. Or maybe the topics discussed is not anymore new to me since I have encountered most of them in my reading assignments or it has been discussed though briefly in our class.