New Webinar - "Finding Your Footing in Times of Uncertainty: Navigating Change, Stress, & Complexity"

Finding Your Footing in Times of Uncertainty: Navigating Change, Stress, and Complexity
A Library 2.0 Masterclass with Loida Garcia-Febo

OVERVIEW: 

Many of us are tired of being told to be resilient. Yet uncertainty, change, and disruption remain part of modern life. This class explores a different perspective: resilience is not about becoming tougher or suppressing our emotions. It is built through small, consistent actions, supportive relationships, and everyday practices that help us navigate challenges with greater confidence, flexibility, and self-compassion.

This 60-minute training is presented by Library 2.0 and hosted by Loida Garcia-Febo. A handout copy of the presentation slides will be available to all who participate.

FOCUS:

• Adapting to continuous change with greater flexibility and self-awareness
• Learning evidence-based practices that strengthen our ability to navigate challenges and recover from setbacks
• Developing practical tools for coping with uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity
• Building confidence and a sense of agency during periods of disruption and transition
• Understanding that resilience is not something we suddenly acquire in difficult moments. It is built through small, everyday actions, choices, and habits that accumulate over time.
• Moving beyond the idea that we need to "toughen up" or become stoic, and instead cultivating the skills, relationships, and perspectives that help us respond effectively to life's challenges.
  

DATE: Wednesday, September 9th, 2026, 2:00 - 3:00 pm US - Eastern Time

COST:

• $99/person - includes live attendance and any-time access to the recording and the presentation slides and receiving a participation certificate. To arrange group discounts (see below), to submit a purchase order, or for any registration difficulties or questions, email admin@library20.com.

TO REGISTER: 

Click HERE to register and pay. You can pay by credit card. You will receive an email within a day with information on how to attend the webinar live and how you can access the permanent webinar recording. If you are paying for someone else to attend, you'll be prompted to send an email to admin@library20.com with the name and email address of the actual attendee.

If you need to be invoiced or pay by check, if you have any trouble registering for a webinar, or if you have any questions, please email admin@library20.com.

NOTE: Please check your spam folder if you don't receive your confirmation email within a day.

SPECIAL GROUP RATES (email admin@library20.com to arrange):

• Multiple individual log-ins and access from the same organization paid together: $75 each for 3+ registrations, $65 each for 5+ registrations. Unlimited and non-expiring access for those log-ins.
• The ability to show the webinar (live or recorded) to a group located in the same physical location or in the same virtual meeting from one log-in: $299.
• Large-scale institutional access for viewing with individual login capability: $499 (hosted either at Learning Revolution or in Niche Academy). Unlimited and non-expiring access for those log-ins.

LOIDA GARCIA-FEBO

Loida Garcia-Febo is a Puerto Rican American librarian and International Library Consultant with 25 years of experience as an expert in library services to diverse populations and human rights. President of the American Library Association 2018-2019. Garcia-Febo is worldwide known for her passion about diversity, communities, sustainability, innovation and digital transformation, library workers, library advocacy, wellness for library workers, and new librarians about which she has taught in 44 countries. In her job, she helps libraries, companies and organizations strategize programs, services and strategies in areas related to these topics and many others. Garcia-Febo has a Bachelors in Business Education, Masters in Library and Information Sciences.

Garcia-Febo has a long history of service with library associations. Highlights include- At IFLA: Governing Board 2013-2017, Co-Founder of IFLA New Professionals, two-term Member/Expert resource person of the Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression Committee of IFLA (FAIFE), two-term member of the Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning Section of IFLA (CPDWL). Currently: CPDWL Advisor, Information Coordinator of the Management of Library Associations Section. Currently at ALA: Chair, IRC United Nations Subcommittee, Chair Public Awareness Committee. Recently at ALA: Chair, Status of Women in Librarianship and Chair, ALA United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals Task Force developing a multi-year strategic plan for ALA. Born, raised, and educated in Puerto Rico, Garcia-Febo has advocated for libraries at the United Nations, the European Union Parliament, U.S. Congress, NY State Senate, NY City Hall, and on sidewalks and streets in various states in the U.S.

OTHER UPCOMING EVENTS:

August 25, 2026

August 28, 2026

September 4, 2026

September 11, 2026

September 16, 2026

September 25, 2026

Fall 2026

Socrates and AI

Most educators I know would say they aspire to teach Socratically, prompting students with questions, drawing out their innate wisdom. The practical reality is that the modern curriculum doesn't allow most teachers the time, flexibility, or individual attention to be a Socratic teacher. However, drilling down past the idealized aspirations gives us a pretty good lens on the arrival of AI in education. Here's why:

A sophist has taken a chair in your classroom. The sophists were Socrates' rivals and opposites: Athens' professional flatterers of the mind, paid to make you sound right rather than be right. This one is brilliant, tireless, endlessly agreeable, and free. Your students talk to it every night. And it is doing, at scale, exactly what its predecessors did — making weak arguments sound strong and sending its clients away pleased with themselves.

Socrates Saw This Coming

In the Phaedrus, Socrates warns against the disruptive information technology of his own moment: writing. His objection wasn't that writing was useless. It was that it would give people the show of wisdom without the reality — they would seem to know many things while understanding little, having received the words without doing the work.

Twenty-four hundred years later, that is still the most precise one-sentence diagnosis of the student AI problem anyone has produced. The machine's fluent output gives the appearance of student understanding. Whether the reality is there too depends entirely on what happened between the student and the words.

Socrates was wrong about writing in the long run. Or maybe he was right, in the same way that the automobile weakens our ability to walk long distances, but we accept the increased capacity to travel as a valuable trade-off. Writing might arguably diminish individual memorization and logical processing, but it dramatically increased access to information and individual participation. His warning wasn't refuted, just contextualized. The question in front of us is whether this new trade can be contextualized the same way — because what's on the table this time feels like a stronger echo of Socrates' concern: will AI remove not the ability, but the need to think?

Two Professions, Two Relationships to A Mind

Athens had two kinds of professionals working on young minds, and the difference between them is a difference that is really helpful to us now.

The sophists were the paid experts. You brought them your argument and they made it sound stronger. You brought them your ambition and they gave it eloquence. They were skilled, in demand, expensive — and their service was fundamentally flattering: you left a sophist's session more impressed with yourself than when you arrived.

Socrates charged nothing and delivered the opposite experience. He examined you. He asked what you meant, then asked again, until the gap between what you could say and what you actually understood stood in the open where you both could see it. People left his sessions annoyed, embarrassed, and — some of them — changed. He called himself a gadfly, and Athens eventually found the stinging intolerable enough to vote him dead.

Flatter the mind, or grow it. That was the choice then. It still is.

The Machine Is a Sophist

Every AI your students use ships with a disposition, and the disposition is the sophist's. It agrees. It elaborates your point rather than testing it. It finds your question fascinating. It makes your rough draft sound finished. It has been tuned, by people and through choices, to be pleasing, because pleasing is what keeps users coming back.

I want to be careful here: the machine is not acting in bad faith, because the machine is not acting at all. The sophistry isn't in the silicon; it was installed by the toolmakers, and it can be overwritten by the user. That's the crack of light in this whole picture. The disposition is a default, not a nature.

But defaults govern almost everyone. And what the default quietly removes is the one condition of real learning the sophist could never supply and the gadfly always did: being challenged. A student can get information from a sophist, encouragement from a sophist, polish from a sophist. What they cannot get is challenge. And challenge is not optional — no amount of encouragement and support substitutes for it.

The Inversion

Here's what has actually changed since Athens, and it's not the method: it's the agency.

Socrates, and Socratic teachers, push the student. The new machine will not do this by default. In the market of eyeballs and adoption, the machine will inevitably be a sophist, however pedagogically sound a Socratic gadfly version would be. If a student wants to be examined and challenged by the new machine, they have to volunteer — and more than volunteer, since this actually takes some work: prompting to be challenged, and continuing to do so when it is hard. That is a higher bar than Athens or the average school has ever set. Being an agentic learner, the learner who summons their own examination, is likely to become increasingly hard and rare. For the student who figures this out, the new machine actually offers a better education than ever. And almost no student will find it on their own — which is where generative adults come in.