Thing 5 - Reflective practice

Reflective practice, to me, is a learning experience.  It's essential to reflect and evaluate on the outcomes of things like courses, workshops, seminars and work / practical experiences. 

At the moment, the most prevalent type of reflective practice is to evaluate what I am doing in the workplace. I am managing the campus library for a week, although my supervisor is a great mentor in helping me to prepare. There is so much that goes on in an academic library - technical issues, keeping up to date with email correspondence and dealing with any conflicting situation that may arise. 

At the same time I'm still trying to develop my own style both as a manager of the environment and a leader that can influence people in a positive way. I'm a perfectionist, so I can be a little hard on myself if I feel I have made the wrong decision about something. But I keep reminding myself to reflect, evaluate and learn and grow. Everyone makes mistakes and we wouldn't learn if we didn't. 

I will be reflecting at the end of this week and also as a process during the week, on what is working well, if anything went wrong and how I would do things differently next time. This is a challenge but I work with some great people, so it makes things a little easier.

Thing 4: Current awareness - Twitter, RSS and Storify

I already have a Twitter account, which I usually only use when I am at conferences like the ALIA Biennial in Sydney. It's great keeping up with the presentations and I got good feedback for the paper I co-presented!

I am new to Storify. I created an account, but haven't got a lot of time right now to learn about it. I will check out some of the other participants use of Storify to get an idea how it works.

I find Google RSS most useful. I have a stack of personal and professional blogs that I follow. I an set them up in folders, which is great, and there are some useful iPad apps for reading RSS feeds, like Flipboard or Reeder. The professional blogs I like are:

• Academic Librarian:  https://blogs.princeton.edu/librarian
• iLibrarian: http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/
• Information Literacy Weblog: http://information-literacy.blogspot.com.au/
• Musings about Librarianship: http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com.au/
• Phil Bradley's Weblog: http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/
• In the Library with the Leadpipe: http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/
• The Embedded Librarian: http://embeddedlibrarian.com/

Thing 3 - Consider your personal brand

What came up on the first page of a search of my name in Google included:

• LinkedIn
• Academia.edu
• Facebook
• My name somewhere on a libguide
• Pinterest account
• Google Plus account
• Diigo account

Apart from one or two entries that referred to a cousin of the same name, they were mostly social media accounts that I have created and yes, they referred to me and my personal or professional branding.On the second page were images of me! That was confronting. Apart from professional photos I use as profile pictures on my social media accounts were a stack of photos from my dancing performances that I have been tagged in or uploaded to accounts like Picasa. It really does give a picture of who you are in the social media sphere, from all your accounts to images. It therefore is important to maintain consistency with a form of branding, like profile picture or colours used. I haven't really done this so I may need to look into it.

All my online presence does tell a story of who I am, both my professional achievements, my connections and my also my personal achievements and hobbies.

Thing 2 - Investigate some other blogs

I have to admit, checking out the blogs of others by country was interesting as I know some of the librarians in Australia doing this program! I did check out some of the other blogs from the UK, for instance. I discovered some people were equally as nervous about blogging, mainly in terms of what other people will think of the posts.

However, I think the more practice you get, the easier it becomes. It is amazing the range of countries and organisations that are represented in this program. I was particularly fascinated with the Music Librarian. That would be an interesting role.

I also discovered that some people had started but not finished the program in the past. I hope that people have an opportunity to dedicate some time to this as part of their learning as it is valuable and interesting. Time is always an issue and things can get pretty hectic at work or home.

I do wish everyone luck on this journey of self discovery.

Thing 1 - Blogging

Hi,

I had a great post that I wrote for Thing 1, but I think I accidentally deleted it. I need to practice my blogging skills and back things up. Oh well. I will write a short post to let you know I have completed 23 Things at my workplace at the Australian Catholic University a few years back, but a refresher and an opportunity to learn new Things is always good.

New Things get created all the time and we need to maintain our professional development and seek out learning opportunities. Sometimes time is a factor, and I came in late in this programme, but I hope to catch up quickly enough. Looking forward to learning what's new out there in the online world.