23 Things for Professional Development: Thing #5

Looking back over the past 4 weeks, a couple of things stand out for me. The first is Thing 2: Reading and commenting on other people's blogs. As I've said before, I like reading blogs and have been doing it for some time. But I'm less good at commenting on those blogs, and feeling like I have something useful to say. Thing 2 really got me thinking about what comments I could make to introduce myself to other people, and that they would find helpful. It also meant that I got a number of comments on my blog, which was a really nice feeling as I knew people were reading what I had written. I hope that I'll continue to read and comment on other's blogs, as I did find it very rewarding. I admit that the amount of comments I leave has already dropped, so this is something I'll have to work hard to achieve.

The second thing is part of Thing 4: setting up a Twitter account. If you read my original post, you'll know that I was really quite sceptical about the whole thing. Well, I can admit when I get something wrong - turns out Twitter is looking pretty useful. I don't follow many people yet, but those I do have left some tweets I've found very interesting. I have to say that they're usually the tweets that link to more in-depth articles - as I said previously, I like there to be quite a lot of detail when I'm reading information. I also quite like having a couple of personal contacts on there - it means I get some "fun" tweets in with all the work-related info. The one problem now is that yes, it's another place to look for all that info. Although I did find this blog post really useful for giving me some practical advice on how to use Twitter. More on that in a future post!

One final point is that I really appreciate having a week for some reflective practice. Over the past few years I've spent a lot of my time thinking reflectively, and I don't think I'm too bad at it. Although if you're struggling with reflecting I think the "What-So what?-Now what?" model (see the cpd23 blog post for a fuller explanation) is a really good, simple one to help you understand what it's all about. I do really appreciate having the time to think over things reflectively - I think it's important to know what's happening and how you'll use it in the future. I also think we all need time to assimilate all the new things we're learning. Taking the time to reflect means that the things we are learning about are more likely to become a useful part of our workflows, rather than being used for a month or two and then put down and forgotten about.

23 Things for Professional Development: Thing #4

So, current awareness. I'm aware of quite a lot that's happening in my professional world, but I could still be missing things. And my ways of keeping up-to-date aren't exactly the same as those suggested by Thing 4. I read a lot of blogs, articles and mailing lists, but have never got as far as setting up a Twitter account - until now. So...

1. Setting up a Twitter account. The reason I haven't had one in the past is because I'm still not convinced of its merit. People have told me how great Twitter is any number of times, but I'm yet to see something to truly convince me. When reading information, I like there to be quite a lot of detail - more than 140 characters can give me. And I also don't necessarily believe the "it's great for following conferences" argument either - I've seen Twitter feeds from conferences before and tend to find they make little sense to me unless I was actually at the conference. In which case, I don't really need the Twitter feed. But I've decided to stop being an old grump, give it a try and see how it goes. I admit, I've only been signed up to it for a few hours, so this comment is premature - but at the moment it's been fun to laugh at some friend's comments. I've not really found many work-related things I want to follow yet. We'll see...

2. RSS feeds. Now this is ground I'm happier on. I use Google Reader already, and love it. It's easy to use, totally intuitive, and as the cpd organisers say, eliminates the need to keep checking sites. Every blog you care about in one easy, accessible place. This is one service I'm not sure how I lived without...

3. Pushnote. I'd actually not heard of this before. I had no choice but to sign up to this at home as work uses Internet Explorer (which I find incredibly annoying as I much prefer Firefox - I love the grouping of tabs you can do with the latest version). I was a bit skeptical about it as it felt like it just might be one more thing for me to keep up-to-date with. However, I think I'm likely to use this more than Twitter as it's just "there" when I have my browser open. I like that people can recommend webpages that might be of interest, although I'm not sure how much it matters to me what other people think of a particular webpage I've already found. This is one I'll definitely keep an eye on to see how much use I get out of it.