What is I-candy?

Flashback: A few months ago, I was chatting with an education professor. Our conversation turned to the issue of how to evaluate the graduate students I teach in my Technology for School Library Media Centers class. I wanted to get the students to think more about ideas we discussed in class. Since she knew I required weekly journal postings of my students, she suggested I assign a topic for them to journal on rather than leave it open-ended. This idea was brilliance and after our conversation was done, I rushed up to share it with the director of the library, my boss. In the last year since she joined Arcadia University from Delaware County Community College, Jeanne had been (and continues to be) an enthusiastic ear to any thoughts I had to share. I perched myself in her office and said, "I have a piece of i-candy--intellectual candy--to share with you." This was the first time I uttered the word that had been bouncing around my head for a few weeks even before that. The day was Friday, 1/23/09.

Jeanne loved the term; so I started using it in other conversations I had with people about ideas I was ruminating on. And no one else has failed to appreciate the serendipity of double entendre and mental imagery.

Now: Here's what I mean when I use the term. I-candy is a choice combination of conceptual ingredients and cogitation that results in something worth sharing with someone else.

In the context of the university library and teaching library research instruction, i-candy usually has to do with some realization I've made about what we librarians teach, how we teach it, and how the students we teach receive it. In this case the i-candy comes under the librarians' topic of Information Literacy. But as you'll notice in my previous post on Circles of Knowledge, i-candy isn't limited to library research instruction. In the case of that model, it had to do with teaching in general. I plan to share my Model of Professional Interaction that is i-candy about constructive workplaces. And there'll be i-candy about thoughts that have nothing to do with libraries or teaching at all. Whatever I happen to be thinking about that I think you might be interested in reading is fair game.

To get a feel for what some of those topics could be, read my tweets at twitter.com/wangc.

Who are you, then? Well, I suspect most of you are librarians. (At the time of this writing, actually, there's only one of you actually following me. If it's who I think it is, she's our Circulation Librarian.) But eventually, I hope, my following will be an eclectic mish-mosh of people who are wondering what a particular academic librarian might be pondering.

Know this, though, I'll try never to get too trivial. There's already too much of that.