Once again, I haven't posted on this blog for a while... that's not because I've done nothing of any interest at work (or at least I hope it's not), but simply because life outside of work has been, well, busy, to put it mildly!
But I do have a couple of work-related things I wanted to share...
Firstly, about a month ago I was asked to contribute to a teaching session for the Masters students studying towards their MSc in Information and Library Management at UWE. I've always been curious about these sessions, as I didn't study for my MSc at UWE (I studied at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen to gain my MSc). So when I was asked if I would help to put together a session on the repository and open access for the course, I was keen to find out what these sessions involved. However, I was also nervous. Now, I spend quite a lot of my time teaching students library-related material and running repository training sessions for university staff, but somehow this was different. This was "proper" teaching... But hey, I thought, it won't be for a while yet, I don't have to worry about it - it will be future Anna's problem. Then I was told the session was in a week and a halfs time. So not only did I now have to think about the session properly, I had a week to write the content for it as well.
Thankfully writing the content was easier than I anticipated. I already had a lot of material ready as part of other training sessions and talks (it turns out a "proper" teaching session isn't very different to a library teaching session - which will hopefully come as no surprise to people who teach library sessions. I wish I was more confident about these things!). Even finding relevant articles and information for the students wasn't too difficult.
When it came to actually teaching the students, I was quite nervous. I started off presenting the session quite hesitantly - not helped by the fact that my boss and one of the senior management team were in the audience. I hate presenting to people who are in charge of me in some sense, it makes me so much more nervous! Thankfully, once I got going I warmed up a lot, and the students seemed really interested. There were only about 7 of them, but they got pretty engaged and were happy to ask questions and be part of a discussion. The second half of the session involved them doing some hands-on exercises, and I got a lot more questions and interest at that point as well - including some questions my boss couldn't answer, which made me feel quite needed! Overall, it was a really rewarding, satisfying experience, helped massively by the interest and engagement that came from the students.
Which all leads me on to my next blog post, which is also about something I anticipate could be highly rewarding and satisfying to do - mentoring.
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