This final unit of Rudaí 23 encouraged us to look outward to our profession and forward to its future. For the majority of us, our parent libraries are not financially independent. Their and our professional survival depends on convincing funders that library services and resources provide value for money, and do so better than an open market would. The exercises in this unit served as an introduction to what we need to do to continue pursuing our careers.
Part of me thinks Thing 19, on podcasts, should have paired a complementary Thing 20 on videos. The other part of me, tracking hours ticking down to the final deadline for reflection, is relieved that this wasn’t so. I’d like to see a study of activities concurrent with listening to podcasts. Is this medium primarily for the harried working adult, fitting in conveniently delivered acoustic education, entertainment, or news around some relatively mindless but necessary activity? Or is there some significant percentage of the audience that devotes their time and attention exclusively to a podcast itself, the way people used to gather around a sole household radio or television? Regardless of the answers, I regret not being able to create a first podcast of my very own. I waited as long as I could, but a lingering cough and sore throat convinced me to pursue the less constructivist option.
Advocacy and engagement, the topic of Thing 20, are vital to what we do. And it’s not just the new that needs to be promoted. Library users forget about—or never develop awareness of—existing services or resources, so attention-drawing or appealing reminders of what we continue to provide should be part of our outreach strategy. Thinking about marketing is what led me to muse over a Thing on videos. We must use multiple channels to deliver our external messages. Our approaches to internal advocacy, on the other hand, will vary with our unique situations. In my current workplace, sometimes the most effective way to provide a new service is to do so undercover, in a way that blends in with already assigned duties. Once faculty start praising something new, it becomes politically awkward for a library administrator to insist that it’s a bad idea.
While the content of Thing 21 was largely familiar, I found writing up some of my involvement in professional associations to be gratifying. In some years, I feel I grow more through external service than through assigned and permitted activities at my job. We are so isolated here, and so underfunded for travel, that it’s a real treat to have the occasional chance to get out and meet colleagues whose jobs are similar to ours—and yet so different.
And a reflection on the MOOC overall, as all good Things must come to an end…
I found Rudaí 23 to be a rewarding experience. While my particular path through the MOOC included times of frustration, and some deliberate decisions to pare down and postpone specific activities, I’ve already had the opportunity to apply some of the skills I learned. This spring semester, I returned to my concept for a “quick and dirty” video about library seating (Thing 4), and developed it into a quick video tour of the library. I tried showing the video as part of my instruction session within a large introductory class, and it seemed to be well received. Thing 17 reminded me that I need to improve the dissemination of my work. This summer would be a good time to (re-)create and upload the text of more of my book reviews into our institutional repository.
I’ve met some new colleagues through Twitter and look forward to continuing to follow them. And perhaps in the future, there will be another version of the course to work through, or similarly organized free programs on other topics. I thank the WRSLAI staff who organized and presented Rudaí 23, and thank all my fellow learners for sharing your discoveries and creations.
Showing posts with label Reflection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reflection. Show all posts
Sunday, April 29, 2018
Monday, April 16, 2018
Thing 18: Reflective Practice
I’m not sure that “critical thinker” is the best title for this unit. Given the variety of issues and resources addressed, perhaps “critical communicator” would be a better description.
Personal information management, the topic of Thing 14, is in a sense how we keep in touch with our past and future selves. Of the resources featured, Feedly was the most useful, but I wouldn't place it in the same category as most of the tools listed. It does, however, serve as a means of monitoring communications transmitted in the form of authors' blog posts.
Thing 15, evaluating information, focused on how we could contribute to the global resource of Wikipedia—an effort to communicate with others from points separated widely in space and time—by locating and citing authoritative sources. Some popular culture trivia buffs are frequent users of my library's reference service, and Wikipedia is our go-to resource for meeting their information needs.
Our digital footprint, addressed in Thing 16, is essentially how we leave signs about ourselves (whether knowingly and deliberately, or not) for others to read. This type of communication is potentially fraught with serious consequences. In an era when hackers routinely get their hands on corporate customer data and the evolution of computer security mimics the evolution of a prey species trying to keep a step ahead of predators, even following every recommended precaution in Brian Hickey's post is at best a strategy of harm reduction.
And of course, sharing our professional output, Thing 17, is a process of intentionally describing, explaining, and disseminating our intellectual and creative work. This is a weakness of mine, although not due to lack of output! My book reviews for Library Journal are regarded as non-scholarly work (it's a trade journal, and they are edited, not peer reviewed). A well-known Library Thinker disparaged the entirety of my oeuvre (last year, to my face) as "only" book reviews. But the few I have posted to my institutional repository are downloaded occasionally. I need to make the time to edit and post more.
I found this unit particularly thought-provoking and challenging. We all vary our professional messages, depending on our immediate circumstances. But I notice a disparity between my intentional communications at work and those I deliver in the context of other professional activities.
When I volunteer for a professional association, I’m expected to take initiative in communicating. Part of why I’ve been asked to serve in various capacities is because my colleagues from other institutions can count on me to alert them to potential problems, to propose solutions, and to provide historical context for current issues. As for continuing education, in this and in other online programs, both instructors and fellow participants state that I offer something new or useful to the learning community. My experience at work, however, is very different. It’s important to avoid creating surprises there and to move cautiously, slowly, and discreetly. Taking the lead in communication is risky.
Perhaps this difference between my two professional selves contributes to my delay in crafting and organizing professional communications. I’m tempted to use administrative speak and sum up the applications of this unit by saying “I could do better.” The question is: how?
Personal information management, the topic of Thing 14, is in a sense how we keep in touch with our past and future selves. Of the resources featured, Feedly was the most useful, but I wouldn't place it in the same category as most of the tools listed. It does, however, serve as a means of monitoring communications transmitted in the form of authors' blog posts.
Thing 15, evaluating information, focused on how we could contribute to the global resource of Wikipedia—an effort to communicate with others from points separated widely in space and time—by locating and citing authoritative sources. Some popular culture trivia buffs are frequent users of my library's reference service, and Wikipedia is our go-to resource for meeting their information needs.
Our digital footprint, addressed in Thing 16, is essentially how we leave signs about ourselves (whether knowingly and deliberately, or not) for others to read. This type of communication is potentially fraught with serious consequences. In an era when hackers routinely get their hands on corporate customer data and the evolution of computer security mimics the evolution of a prey species trying to keep a step ahead of predators, even following every recommended precaution in Brian Hickey's post is at best a strategy of harm reduction.
And of course, sharing our professional output, Thing 17, is a process of intentionally describing, explaining, and disseminating our intellectual and creative work. This is a weakness of mine, although not due to lack of output! My book reviews for Library Journal are regarded as non-scholarly work (it's a trade journal, and they are edited, not peer reviewed). A well-known Library Thinker disparaged the entirety of my oeuvre (last year, to my face) as "only" book reviews. But the few I have posted to my institutional repository are downloaded occasionally. I need to make the time to edit and post more.
I found this unit particularly thought-provoking and challenging. We all vary our professional messages, depending on our immediate circumstances. But I notice a disparity between my intentional communications at work and those I deliver in the context of other professional activities.
When I volunteer for a professional association, I’m expected to take initiative in communicating. Part of why I’ve been asked to serve in various capacities is because my colleagues from other institutions can count on me to alert them to potential problems, to propose solutions, and to provide historical context for current issues. As for continuing education, in this and in other online programs, both instructors and fellow participants state that I offer something new or useful to the learning community. My experience at work, however, is very different. It’s important to avoid creating surprises there and to move cautiously, slowly, and discreetly. Taking the lead in communication is risky.
Perhaps this difference between my two professional selves contributes to my delay in crafting and organizing professional communications. I’m tempted to use administrative speak and sum up the applications of this unit by saying “I could do better.” The question is: how?
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Thing 13: Reflective Practice (Online Networker Things)
It's time to reflect on Things 10-12, each offering options for online professional networking. I found these Things provided much food for thought.
Creating and sustaining a professional brand is an ideal, but at a time of significant political—and hence social—change in my country, can the professional be neatly separated from the personal? As I hinted in my Thing 10 post, many of the individual American librarians I follow on Twitter create and/or retweet a fair amount of political content, and I do as well. What effects (if any) this display of the personal may have on my professional future remain to be determined.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how many prospective professional colleagues in the U.S. or Canada would look for me on Twitter (or Facebook or Instagram) first. Au courant Americans in librarianship tend to create and maintain their own professional websites. If I want to know more about individual librarians or library school students from my country, I start by searching for those sites, turning to LinkedIn and ORCID as second choices. Twitter (and probably Facebook and Instragram) enables me to get a sense of their personal lives and thoughts.
American academic librarians typically fill those professional websites with evidence of publications and presentations. Unfortunately, my publication and speaking history reflects both a workplace with no systematic support for scholarly endeavors and my own failure to seek a mentor early in my career. Seventy or so Library Journal book reviews occupy a fair bit of space on my ORCID profile, but they don’t impress librarians with faculty status who are on the tenure track. (Readers, if you’re interested in mentoring or collaborating with a novice at research and publication in librarianship, let me know!)
The more I contemplate LinkedIn, on the other hand, the more opportunity I see to highlight my extensive professional service experience. The profiles of other Rudaí 23 participants and STEM librarians I know are shaping my plans for populating my profile.
Consciously building a brand, however, raises the question of whether that brand is marketable. One of my strengths is that I’m an experienced public services subject librarian with a focus in STEM disciplines; another is that I’m good at working with “returning” or “nontraditional” students. But based on what I read in current U.S. advertisements, many employers find these of little interest. They appear to prefer recently acquired technical skills instead. Hopefully pursuing MOOCs like this one will make my skill set more appealing. With ageing relatives in another state, it behooves me to build my professional brand and expand my online networking efforts.
On the lighter side, two weeks from now, I’ll get my first opportunity to use Skype professionally. Because this winter is particularly harsh, it thrilled me when a committee organizer offered the option of remote access to a meeting located ninety minutes from my workplace. Next week I’ll test several devices to see what works best, and then it’s time to actively network online!
Creating and sustaining a professional brand is an ideal, but at a time of significant political—and hence social—change in my country, can the professional be neatly separated from the personal? As I hinted in my Thing 10 post, many of the individual American librarians I follow on Twitter create and/or retweet a fair amount of political content, and I do as well. What effects (if any) this display of the personal may have on my professional future remain to be determined.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how many prospective professional colleagues in the U.S. or Canada would look for me on Twitter (or Facebook or Instagram) first. Au courant Americans in librarianship tend to create and maintain their own professional websites. If I want to know more about individual librarians or library school students from my country, I start by searching for those sites, turning to LinkedIn and ORCID as second choices. Twitter (and probably Facebook and Instragram) enables me to get a sense of their personal lives and thoughts.
American academic librarians typically fill those professional websites with evidence of publications and presentations. Unfortunately, my publication and speaking history reflects both a workplace with no systematic support for scholarly endeavors and my own failure to seek a mentor early in my career. Seventy or so Library Journal book reviews occupy a fair bit of space on my ORCID profile, but they don’t impress librarians with faculty status who are on the tenure track. (Readers, if you’re interested in mentoring or collaborating with a novice at research and publication in librarianship, let me know!)
The more I contemplate LinkedIn, on the other hand, the more opportunity I see to highlight my extensive professional service experience. The profiles of other Rudaí 23 participants and STEM librarians I know are shaping my plans for populating my profile.
Consciously building a brand, however, raises the question of whether that brand is marketable. One of my strengths is that I’m an experienced public services subject librarian with a focus in STEM disciplines; another is that I’m good at working with “returning” or “nontraditional” students. But based on what I read in current U.S. advertisements, many employers find these of little interest. They appear to prefer recently acquired technical skills instead. Hopefully pursuing MOOCs like this one will make my skill set more appealing. With ageing relatives in another state, it behooves me to build my professional brand and expand my online networking efforts.
On the lighter side, two weeks from now, I’ll get my first opportunity to use Skype professionally. Because this winter is particularly harsh, it thrilled me when a committee organizer offered the option of remote access to a meeting located ninety minutes from my workplace. Next week I’ll test several devices to see what works best, and then it’s time to actively network online!
Friday, October 27, 2017
Thing 9: Reflective Practice (Visual Communicator Things, Option 2)
My task for this Thing is to reflect on Thing 3, an overview of image banks, Thing 7, an exercise in creating a small online exhibit, and Thing 8, gaining some experience in making an infographic. What an experience of extremes these last two were!
Completing Thing 3 was not an "extreme" activity, but still informative. I've used multiple image banks before (Flickr, Google Images, Noun Project, and Pixabay) when searching for just the right image to use, professionally (promotional posters and blurbs) and personally (mostly Christmas cards). Instead of focusing on the act of searching for an image, I chose to examine image tagging, as this determines what one can retrieve from a collection. I cannot tell whether my observations of Pixabay--finding that the visual representation of "entrepreneur" is narrowly defined--reflect an editorial voice, a type of groupthink on the part of Pixabay users who mark images with "Like" or "Favorite," or something else. Regardless, the experience makes clear that it’s essential to try multiple image banks when searching for representation of a type of person or a personal attribute. (And ideally, we users should create and add images that broaden the pool of options available for the next searcher.)
Thing 7 started out uncomfortably and the experience never improved. I couldn’t find any on-site collections appropriate for an exhibit and settled on re-working a handout—not the best of options. What I created was an unremarkable website comprised of a couple of pages. The whole experience was slow and tedious, even painful. Browsing through a multitude of themes--each with multiple possible variants--and "trying them out" holds absolutely no appeal for me. (I’m lucky that I’ve never had to select paint colors for a room, as I would run out of patience rapidly.) Trying to keep on schedule for Rudaí 23 added additional pressure. I grew fatigued, made mistakes, got frustrated, and made still more mistakes. CSS is a weakness of mine, and trying to revise the template to create the visual features I wanted gave me a headache. (When you have a brain injury, as I do, you can literally think too hard.) While I am not sold on using Blogger to create an online exhibit, the Thing wasn’t a complete exercise in futility. Since I feel more comfortable modifying templates, I have removed gadget clutter from this blog and added items I prefer to highlight. Other platforms listed in the original Thing post (WordPress and Omeka) might be more user-friendly, and I’d be willing to try them during a less stressful time of the academic year. At the job, however, I work in a department committed to LibGuides, and I am required to stick with that platform for anything I create in my role as a subject liaison librarian.
Fortunately, Thing 8 yielded considerably more reward for effort. The most challenging part of the activity was selecting a topic to portray via an infographic (so many options, so little time). There are a couple of reasons why this activity “clicked” with me. First, Piktochart presents a limited number of templates for each option (infographic, presentation, or “printable”), so it’s less of a cognitive load to browse the site. Second, the program steers users towards creating “blocks”--modular content that speeds the design of an infographic skeleton. Blocks can actually make for more flexibility in design--I used slides 1-4 and 8 of “Education Basic,” a presentation template(!) for something that is not a series of slides. Finally, I had the benefit of previous exposure to Piktochart via a webinar, and prior attendance at a library conference session on graphic design. I knew the key was to incorporate plenty of white space, minimal text, and just a few strong graphics. Looking back, I might have pared my content even more by removing the numbered blocks and reducing visual clutter in one block that contains three separate images. Because I found the execution of this Thing relatively painless, and the results look so professional, I will see if I can find opportunities to create more infographics (or other Piktochart items) in the future.
Statistics indicate that people from far-flung places (the Middle East and Asia as well as Europe and North America) have taken a look at my blog. I hope this post and others provide some useful information to readers, as well as a peek into the professional life and continuing education of an academic librarian.
Completing Thing 3 was not an "extreme" activity, but still informative. I've used multiple image banks before (Flickr, Google Images, Noun Project, and Pixabay) when searching for just the right image to use, professionally (promotional posters and blurbs) and personally (mostly Christmas cards). Instead of focusing on the act of searching for an image, I chose to examine image tagging, as this determines what one can retrieve from a collection. I cannot tell whether my observations of Pixabay--finding that the visual representation of "entrepreneur" is narrowly defined--reflect an editorial voice, a type of groupthink on the part of Pixabay users who mark images with "Like" or "Favorite," or something else. Regardless, the experience makes clear that it’s essential to try multiple image banks when searching for representation of a type of person or a personal attribute. (And ideally, we users should create and add images that broaden the pool of options available for the next searcher.)
Thing 7 started out uncomfortably and the experience never improved. I couldn’t find any on-site collections appropriate for an exhibit and settled on re-working a handout—not the best of options. What I created was an unremarkable website comprised of a couple of pages. The whole experience was slow and tedious, even painful. Browsing through a multitude of themes--each with multiple possible variants--and "trying them out" holds absolutely no appeal for me. (I’m lucky that I’ve never had to select paint colors for a room, as I would run out of patience rapidly.) Trying to keep on schedule for Rudaí 23 added additional pressure. I grew fatigued, made mistakes, got frustrated, and made still more mistakes. CSS is a weakness of mine, and trying to revise the template to create the visual features I wanted gave me a headache. (When you have a brain injury, as I do, you can literally think too hard.) While I am not sold on using Blogger to create an online exhibit, the Thing wasn’t a complete exercise in futility. Since I feel more comfortable modifying templates, I have removed gadget clutter from this blog and added items I prefer to highlight. Other platforms listed in the original Thing post (WordPress and Omeka) might be more user-friendly, and I’d be willing to try them during a less stressful time of the academic year. At the job, however, I work in a department committed to LibGuides, and I am required to stick with that platform for anything I create in my role as a subject liaison librarian.
Fortunately, Thing 8 yielded considerably more reward for effort. The most challenging part of the activity was selecting a topic to portray via an infographic (so many options, so little time). There are a couple of reasons why this activity “clicked” with me. First, Piktochart presents a limited number of templates for each option (infographic, presentation, or “printable”), so it’s less of a cognitive load to browse the site. Second, the program steers users towards creating “blocks”--modular content that speeds the design of an infographic skeleton. Blocks can actually make for more flexibility in design--I used slides 1-4 and 8 of “Education Basic,” a presentation template(!) for something that is not a series of slides. Finally, I had the benefit of previous exposure to Piktochart via a webinar, and prior attendance at a library conference session on graphic design. I knew the key was to incorporate plenty of white space, minimal text, and just a few strong graphics. Looking back, I might have pared my content even more by removing the numbered blocks and reducing visual clutter in one block that contains three separate images. Because I found the execution of this Thing relatively painless, and the results look so professional, I will see if I can find opportunities to create more infographics (or other Piktochart items) in the future.
Statistics indicate that people from far-flung places (the Middle East and Asia as well as Europe and North America) have taken a look at my blog. I hope this post and others provide some useful information to readers, as well as a peek into the professional life and continuing education of an academic librarian.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)