The European Chapter (EC) of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) organises events as part of their series on Information Science Trends, which focus on a current research topic introduced by invited speakers from research and industry. And much to my surprise: I was asked to be one of three keynote speakers at this event!
This year’s event focused on Health Information Behavior, and due to COVID-19 it was organised online from 8.-10. June 2020. Next to invited keynote speakers, researchers and practictioners could submit extended abstracts related to topics like:
- investigations on health information-seeking and health information use
- health information literacy
- health information behavior on social media
- health information disclosure (privacy concerns, privacy paradox)
- conducting health information research online (esp. during a pandemic)
- open health data
Outline of Programme
The conference was spread over three days with 3 hours of presentations on Zoom (each day form 15.00 – 18.00 CEST) with appropriate breaks between the presentations. I think this work really well, it was engaging and fun and this schedule also prevented zoom fatique (at least for me). The sessions I attended were moderated by Aylin Ilhan, who kept the audience engaged and included some funny audience questions and shared fun facts. You can see the schedule of each day here, and all abstracts of the presentations here.
Keynotes & Presentations
Each day started with a 30 minutes keynote and as my keynote was scheduled for the last day, this gave me the great opportunity to watch the other speakers first.
- Inez Bailey (Senior Lecturer in Information Science, Strathclyde iSchool): Health literacy in practice in Ireland.
- Dianne Pennington (Chief Executive of the National Adult Literacy Agency): Health (mis)information behaviour in the Covid-19 era’
My keynote was titled: “My Work Tool” versus “My Body, My Data”: Conflicting stakeholder perspectives on digital data access. You can click through my slides here:
The audience was quite active on Twitter during the online conference, which I really learned to appreciate especially when conferences are not online and I have serious conference-FOMO (fear of missing out). You can check out the #AECIST20 and probably find a lot of people you might want to follow. For instance, Sheila Webber, who also wrote a series of blog posts about the conference (Day 1 Part a, Day 1 Part b, Day 2, Day 3), where she also gave a presentation. Or Bruce Ryan, who basically live-tweeted the event and compiled a wonderful summary with his personal remarks (which I really like!) here.
Personal reflection
I was pretty excited to give my first keynote. But I have to admit that while I was preparing my slides, I asked myself more than once: “Why did I say yes??” But that was of course a mix of a) the impostor syndrome saying “Hi”, b) myself being pushed out of my comfort zone, and c) my little perfectionist self wanting to give a great presentation and spending wayyyy too much time on preparations. In the end it was such a great experience: The audience was very kind, asked super interesting questions afterwards and also shared their impressions and thoughts on Twitter. So unsurprisingly: I am really glad I said yes! And what’s more: shortly afterwards I even got a little surprise Thank-You-Gift from the organisers. What’s more to like? 😊
Thanks so much @Aylinnchen #AECIST20 What a nice surprise!! 🤗 pic.twitter.com/kXkD6wti2q
— Christiane Grünloh (@c_gruenloh) June 23, 2020
