Saturday 21 August 2010

Thing 13 - Reflection week (cross that off: reflection hour for me! Sorry!)


Well, this week I discovered I have a multimodal (VARK) learning style - in practice this means I'm greedy, I'd like a little bit of everything in the way the tasks are presented please! I've found the 23 Things website posts very good in the pointers they gave, the balance of articles to read and optional ideas to explore the Things further just right for me - thank you to Emma, Libby, Andy, Kirsty, Emma-Jane and Sarah!

The photo on the left was taken in India in December 2007: Margao market encapsulated my whole experience of India, a whirlwind of an assault on the senses: so much colour, so much noise, so many (strong!) smells and unusual tastes (to me of course): I truly loved it, but my two weeks in Goa felt like a blur and an onslaught on the senses.
And that's pretty much how I feel about the 23 Things programme.

So far I've very much enjoyed exploring various new technologies I knew precious little about before starting, but by not taking as much time as I would have liked to explore several of the Things in depth, I've forced myself into a whirlwind of new technologies which can sometimes be frustrating. I totally agree with various colleagues that however much time people choose to devote to it is entirely up to them - I just wish I'd given myself more time on this, at work or at home, earlier on.

On a much more positive side, I do feel a lot more confident about most of the new technologies we've looked at so far and am very glad I finally got going with this. A lot of these (LibraryThing, Delicious, podcasts, Zotero, ...) I'd heard of but had not given myself time to get to grips with them. Some (SlideShare) I'd never heard of before. This, thankfully, is rapidly changing now, and I'll be championing some of these Things for my library with other enthusiastic colleagues; this new technologies adventure has opened up a whole new world of possibilities within my own workplace and part of me is jumping up and down inside, extremely keen to critically explore potential uses of these new technologies for my library.

One unexpected side-effect that came with reading so many excellent blogs, engaging, well-written and reflective, has brought in sharp relief how many excellent librarians we have in Cambridge: as a profession we have much to be proud of, let's make people aware of it and let's make the most of it!

So, surprisingly, if I were to recommend just one Thing to a colleague at this point... it would probably be blogging. How odd! I'm loving reading everybody else's blog but am still not convinced about blogging myself. Some perceptions change slower than others!

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