Thing 5

This looks like it's going to be the toughest post yet for me to write, reflective thinking is not something I think I do a great deal of! To start me off I began reading over some of the most recent posts for Thing 5 on the 23 Things for Professional Development blog. Thank you to Emma, Wendy and Polly for your help!

I am going to take the systematic approach, as I have always found that works best for me. Making bullet points under headings and planning exactly how to approach something is usually the way I go for whatever task I have to complete.

1. Recall it

Over the last couple of weeks I have learnt a great deal whilst working my way through the first five Things. Firstly we started out by setting up a blog and then beginning to use it to express our efforts and thoughts about each Thing we came to tackle. Secondly we spent some time expanding on this by looking at the blogs of our fellow bloggers. Thing 3 brought us to consider our personal brand, spending time finding out what information we could access about ourselves online and whether it portrayed the image we wanted it to. Thing 4 involved lots of parts, learning about Twitter, RSS feeds and Sporify. And this brings us up to this, learning the importance of reflective thinking (although it's not quite complete yet!).

2. Evaluate it

I feel so far I have learnt a great deal in the last few weeks, and been encouraged to use those Things I had used before more frequently. Blogging is an art that I feel I will take some time to gain confidence in, but what has definitely helped is having this structure to persuade (force being a too strong a word!) me to log on and blog. Having a 'project' to complete will always help me to keep doing something, and hopefully after this years 23 things programme has finished I will have gotten in the habit of coming to this page every week or so. This is why I think my blogging on the CATALOG website has been so successful, I have made myself the task of ensuring at least once a month I write a piece on what I have been upto at work. This is of course giving me a great record of what I have been doing during this one year scheme, and hopefully will be helpful to others considering librarianship as a career. In Thing 2, looking at the blogs of others has definitely helped me to understand what blogging is about, especially as some people have been working on them for a great deal of time. I have always felt learning from example is an efficient way to absorb ideas, and this approach definitely helps me there.

I began looking at Thing 3 thinking what a strange idea! I had never thought about how I appear online, aside from ensuring I don't share any information I do not want the world to know. This task definitely encouraged me to fiddle around with this blog - although still not satisfied with the design I do love the flowers! One day I shall get out with a camera and take some semi-decent photos of myself and come up with an idea for a more personalized background.

Finally Thing 4 was the task I enjoyed most so far - particularly using Sporify as this was completely new to me. As I said previously I have never been sure about Twitter, partly because I don't know many people who use it themselves. Maybe if all my friends were tweeting about themselves it would interest me more. Sporify was great to play around with, but I don't know if it is something I would use much at this stage. Maybe I just need to learn more about what it can do!

3. Apply it

All these things I have learnt about could be very useful to a modern library - I especially enjoy reading Polly's blog for Newnham College Library. I will be going to the Judge Business School library (Cambridge) in a few weeks as part of the Penumbra shadowing scheme, and particularly requested to see how they use technology such as this in their library.

Over the next few months I am going to make a particular effort to blog, and keep up with the 23 Things (I am now on track! On to Thing 6 next week :-)). Twitter is something I plan to experiment with, and again with Sporify, I hope I can come up with more excuses to use it on here.

As to reflective thinking, I hope this hasn't bored you to senseless - it is rather long!

Thing 4... the important bit

This is a bit late, but I seem to be behind on all my things at the moment!

Okay, what did I do yesterday? I am not new to Twitter, but it must be said that I am not a big tweeter. I find Twitter a little strange, as I never feel I have anything to share with everyone that takes up such a small amount of space! At university I did find it useful though, following organisations such as the university library and computer services. I also like to check it occasionally to see what is going on with friends who are more avid tweeters than me. So it does have it's uses. I do feel it would be more important to me if I had some medium to use it, that wasn't a laptop or pc, so I could it on the move and quickly. Having to turn this on, find the website, log in and then post is not terribly easy!

Again, I feel the RSS feeds would be particularly useful on a phone! I have been using these for a while, without really appreciating what they are and learning what it is an abbreviation for amuses me. I guess SS would be too short? I do think this is an interesting tool to see everyones blogs though, which definitely helps when it comes to figuring out what I should write. Now I can use it more than just for looking at the BBC news on my Google homepage. I subscribed to 'Infoism' which I think will be good reading. It was also interesting to note a blog he wrote on the subject of volunteering in libraries, which I had been reading more about earlier in an email LinkedIn had sent me due to my being a member of the 'CILIP: Library, Information and Knowledge Professionals' group. I would definitely recommend joining it if you are on LinkedIn (which you should be!).

Finally on to Sporify - something completely new to me. A little tricky to get my head around at first - but I did have fun playing around! I was sad to see some people had not posted their 'stories' in their blog, though it did take me a while to figure out how to! I did enjoy looking at all the photographs in The Wandering Librarian's blog of libraries he will be visiting in Chicago, again I find it amazing how many different people are taking part in this.

All in all I have found these (3) things fascinating to play with, and I know I have barely scratched the surface. I look forward to meddling a little more, when some time allows.

Here's to Thing 5...