Showing posts with label PD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PD. Show all posts

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Social Curation

My family and friends think I'm nuts because I don't have a TV and I don't read the paper or magazines (unless they're free!). But I've noticed time and time again that I hear the latest news before they do, and manage to keep hyper-informed about issues that matter to me, be that current news, or things that I'm personally or professionally interested in. I admit I spend a lot of time glued to the screen (either my desktop at work, or my phone or laptop at home) but I'm a very selective consumer of information and I know how to evaluate it. Also I love discovering new sources of information and I'm not overly attached to any one source - if a website that I like starts to fill up with advertising at the expense of content, then they've lost my patronage. To be honest there is another reason why I don't have a TV or pay for content - it's because I can think of a million other things I'd rather spend my (limited!) money on and the internet offers everything I need. I pay for fast and reliable internet and I choose the content. And speaking of choosing content...
content curation tools
Image by Aivar Ruukel on Flickr, creative commons licence
Actually, this post was supposed to be about social curation tools because that's the topic for ANZ23mthings for this week - Thing 14: Curating with Pinterest, Tumblr, and Scoop.it and co-incidentally it also happens to be the week that we are launching our PD reading project at work, using the lovely Scoop.it as a platform. As part of the process of choosing which of the many social curation tools to go with, we analysed and compared a whole bunch of them. We rejected Delicious and Diigo as being old school in the way that they displayed content - visually uninteresting - although they did have better group and privacy settings. We rejected Pinterest on the basis that it was more suited to images and browsing rather than deeper reading, and we weren't that impressed with the web interface although it's great on a tablet or smartphone. Everyone was impressed by Flipboard but felt that it was once again more suited to the touch interface rather than the desktop, and didn't have enough scope for commenting on articles on the desktop version. Although I've decided to use it for my personal use and totally loving it.

We ended up being happy with our choice of Scoop.it although we are still in the early stages of our project. The aim is to get the whole team contributing articles of interest to our work, read the one's that spark our interest, and comment on them. The emphasis is on the reading and commenting part rather than merely collecting. We've got a controlled list of tags to make searching by topic easy. For me, the best part of this project is that we are all working in the same context (i.e. we are aware of the current library landscape outside of our immediate work environment) and we are all engaging in PD which is not daunting and hopefully will become a part of our daily or weekly routine.

The page we've created is pretty much just for our group so I'm not going to provide and links or details. We did notice that there wasn't a visually exciting social curation site that offered exactly what we needed - a space for a private group to collaborate. The trend is social, so you have to share! Let's see if what we have suits our needs...
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Tuesday, July 16, 2013

My challenge

My challenge is to identify a social tool, a web service or a new idea gleamed from my professional reading that I think will take off in FY14, and give a 3 minute presentation on it to my colleagues. I've been thinking of so many different things for this challenge (inspired by 23 mobile things and my tweet stream mostly!) such as infographics, MOOCs, Google hangouts, coding for beginners, etc. I want to feature something that is perhaps new to my colleagues and that could have a direct impact on our work.

I'm choosing Twitter for this challenge, but not for the usual reasons of networking with a fellow librarians and keeping up with emerging trends ... although these are of course huge reasons for signing up. I'm going to be focusing on the benefits of following the tweets of library vendors, aggregators, government departments and so on. Because our college is focussed so narrowly on one subject area we can easily follow organisations that are related to just this field, plus those who provide our resources. This kind of information usually arrives in our inboxes as email newsletters, but for those who want an alternative, well, there's this. Here are some tweets that I've picked out from my stream in the past couple of months. They feature

  • Upgrade alerts to products we use such as Mendeley and Discovery Search
  • Info about relevant new journals, ebooks and apps
  • Free training and PD opportunities
  • Links to relevant resources that could be useful additions to our Libguides 

Warning: Very long list of embedded tweets follows!



















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Thursday, July 4, 2013

Hm, July already?

Well I managed 24 posts in the month of #blogjune which is not so bad... in the last week though I really slumped. It wasn't a lack of time that caused the slump, rather the intensity of doing something every single day just overwhelmed me. Still, I got a lot out of it and will surely be in it again next year :)

I've had a good week. I created a tutorial video for a bioscience imagebase and human anatomy learning tool which was a bit scary as I did it live with five of my librarian colleagues listening in from the Eastern States. The 40 minute video is on our LibGuides but I'm not sure if I can bring myself watch it back even though I've had good feedback about it. It's always a bit weird to listen to yourself isn't it? 

At our college there are a few subjects that all first year students have to take. We often have students of these subjects in the library asking for help and the librarians prepare look at the assignment questions in advance and knowing where the resources to answer them are located. I've decided to go one step further and actually enrol in one of these subjects and do the assignments. It's an online subject, so I'm also curious to see what encouragement is provided to use the library, and whether the library's online resources are sufficient to answer the questions. I think the course should be pretty interesting too - it's called History of Healing and I've just listened to the first week's lectures and participated in the forum. The course continues for a full 13 weeks so I hope I can maintain the intensity.

An update on the other courses I'm doing at the moment...

Swimming in the Information Ocean - we're now in week 8 (or maybe 9) of this 10 week course and it's crux time. We're creating a wiki (my page is on Library Services on Mobile Devices) and I think I'm pretty much on track with everything. Just need to put in a couple of solid days next week and then the finish line will be in sight. 

ANZ 23 Mobile Things - I've faded out of this course a bit, although I'm still reading the blog regularly.  I enjoyed the Google Hangouts Thing and I'd like to try this out with my work colleagues at some stage. We use Skype at the moment so I'd like to compare the two to see if there are particular advantages to using one over the other. This week is calendars on the mobile, and I've heard that you can sync a work Outlook calendar with the iPhone calendar, so I'm going to try to work that out next week. Wondering whether I should also get my work emails on my mobile... hmm.

Looking forward - I'm excited about moving to full-time at my library at the end of this month and giving up my cataloging job (I will miss somethings about it...). And I'm looking forward to the Future of the Profession meeting on July 19th. And... I caught my cat being naughty and made a GIF out of it. My first one! fun :


MS4Kwy on Make A Gif, Animated Gifs

make animated gifs like this at MakeAGif
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Tuesday, June 11, 2013

11. PD - why I say yes

I read Octopus Librarian's excellent post on work / life balance and thought about all the things I've said 'yes' to and why, since graduating six months ago. That made me remember all the other times I've started something new, and how useful it was to say yes.

Like when I went to teach English in Austria with no German language skills whatsoever. My Austrian colleagues obviously felt sorry for me because they invited my to everything going - I joined a rock-climbing class, took up indoor hockey, went to art shows and cafes in Vienna, learnt to ice-skate on a frozen lake, and babysat Austrian children.

Me in the middle, on a frozen lake. Hungary in the distance.
I said yes to all the invitations, stumbled along with the language, and my confidence grew - this despite the fact that I'm a total introvert. But before long I felt confident enough to say no to the activities that I tried and didn't like (out of all of the above, the only one I didn't like were the Viennese cafes - too smoky!), or when I felt like I was too busy. I even said it in German. My point is that participation really accelerates learning and confidence.

Since I started working as a librarian, my favourite thing to say yes to is PD. I'm full of energy as new grads are - I'm like a sponge, just want to absorb all the information. Overload? Bah! I'm not sure if I'll still feel this way 10 years into my library career (but who knows?), so I'm making the most of it. In the past 6 months I've signed up for

  • A 10 week TAFE / ALIA course
  • ANZ 23 Mobile Things course
  • A 1st year unit at the college where I work called History of Healing
  • Copyright training
  • 2 MOOCs
  • RDA intensive training weekend
  • A whole bunch of database webinars
  • A TAFE course to become a Justice of the Peace (why not?)
  • The ALIA PD program with Health Specialisation
Some of these I can do in work time, others I do in my own time. None of them cost me (personally) any money. And I'm really enjoying them all, and learning heaps! None of them stress me out (well... wait for assignment time, um..) and so far, nothing is infringing on my life outside of work. I'm more wary of signing up for things that are on-going (i.e. no end in sight... committees, minute taking, etc.) or things where I won't learn anything new (e.g. volunteer cataloguing). These are the criteria I use to make a yes or no decision regarding whether to take on something new. 
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