Reflection in the lake

This blog is part of 23 Things for Professional Development, a course encouraging information professionals to explore online tools.

My last task in CPD23 is to reflect on what’s next. For me, CPD23 has been split quite clearly into its two areas of focus: online tools and general professional development. I’ll admit that I mainly got involved out of interest in the tools. It’s been good to have a push to look at some tools I hadn’t had the chance to look at, and also to review and consider the tools I’m already using.

Mendeley is the tool I’ve really picked up and ran with out of the ones I tried in the programme. However, I’ll also admit that I’ve been back to and started using Evernote since I purchased an Apple-branded tablet device in the autumn: the synchronisation has suddenly become a lot more valuable to me.

I’ve also enjoyed thinking about the wider CPD themes covered, and it’s those I mostly focused upon in the personal development plan I completed for this task. I was actually surprised how many concrete ideas I already had for what I wanted to achieve this year: writing them down has pointed out just how many goals I’ve been secretly setting myself! Having this record will definitely help me review what I’ve achieved. I think it’s quite nice to have a PDP outside my formal institutional development plan, as some of my personal goals don’t really tend to fit within that structure. Maybe it’s something I’ll do next year as well.

Many thanks to the organisers of CPD23 for arranging all these fun times.

This week is relatively calm.

This blog is part of 23 Things for Professional Development, a course encouraging information professionals to explore online tools.

So, Thing 19 is my chance to think about the tools I’ve looked at so far, and we’ve been given an extra week to tackle it, so I’m in no hurry! I’ve found the tools covered fell into three categories:

1. Unknowns. Tools I’ve heard of, but never looked at.
2. Could-do-better. Tools which I’ve signed up for, or am even using, but where I could be better exploiting the features.
3. Knowns. Tools I’m using, and I love.

The could-do-better tools have been interesting, as these ‘Things’ have made me think about how I use and integrate web tools into my everyday life. I’ve made a few resolutions associated with these. Now seems like a good time to summarise them:

• Make my website less stern-looking (I’ve made a bit of progress on this one, but still want to move my blog to the home page)
• Keep an eye out for opportunities to use file sharing in my work (ongoing)
• Try different tools to vary the delivery of my teaching (ongoing)

The unknown tools were my favourites to look at. Some of these I have loathed immediately (i.e.Pushnote!), others were more succesful. Mendeley is far away the most successful tool I’ve tried: I was always sceptical about trying it, as I’m not really bothered about its pdf annotation features, but so far it’s really working for me as a reference management tool, for my out-of-work research. In work, well, it’s a crying shame that I can’t use the desktop client, and this stops me from recommending it to students too.

Of course, there’s been a bunch of other themes and resolutions of a tool-free nature. I’m thinking I’ll come back to those as part of the final ‘Thing’.

Making your message flower depends partly on content, partly on presentation

This blog is part of 23 Things for Professional Development, a course encouraging information professionals to explore online tools.

Although Thing 17 – presentation tools Prezi and Slideshare – and Thing 18 – screencapture through Jing and podcasting through Audacity – appeared out of order, my slowness in getting to them allows me to tackle them as intended! All are tools which I’m familiar with in various detail, and my engagement with them has varied according to need on a number of different levels. This post primarily discusses how I have / might use these tools for teaching.

Let’s start with Prezi. It’s a really fascinating tool, and one which I’ve seen applied with great success. Here’s a Prezi I prepared for use with a class of Physics and Astronomy students last year. It all needs updating over the next couple of weeks, as a few of our systems have changed. The idea behind it was to contextualise the hands-on elements of the session (using bibliographic databases and RefWorks) within the broader picture of information literacy skills, so that students (hopefully!) see the tools we’re learning as part of a wider picture. Feedback on the session was mixed (some were very positive, some were slightly seasick!) but I’m persevering this year, and the positive comments were very positive! I’d recommend it, especially if you literally want people to ‘see the bigger picture’ behind a concept. I’ll be delivering our Graduate School Media Zoo training on Prezi this coming semester, so I’ll be revisiting Prezi then (and to update the Physics and Astronomy session).

Slideshare, well, I have an account, but it’s a big old non-event. I’ve uploaded the slides for one session I taught there, but students weren’t impressed, and they all got me to email them the ‘real’ presentation instead! Presentations I’ve delivered for external events have usually been hosted elsewhere, but I will make more of an effort to duplicate them in my own space in the future. Addressing the question asked in Thing 17, I don’t think that Slideshare could replace my online CV right now. It doesn’t fit the skills that I see as my selling point!

Screencapture via Jing is a flat ‘no’ from me. I’m asked to use the tools my workplace provides – Adobe Presenter and Captivate – to make this kind of presentation for my job, and while I’ll enthusiastically revisit Jing whenever I have the need, now’s not the time to be learning two overlapping tools! I’m currently designing three Chemistry tutorials on finding information and the literature in Chemistry using Presenter. I’m facing a similar aim and challenge here as I describe for the Prezi, making sure I contextualise step-by-step ‘how to use this tool’ information within an information literacy framework.

Finally, Audacity. I actually learnt how to use Audacity in my MA Librarianship. I like the tool a lot, but I haven’t found a reason to make a podcast since. It’s not because I’m not an auditory person – I listen to podcasts, and music a lot. But for me, a tool doesn’t really enter my consciousness until it meets a need, and I don’t see a need for solely auditory information the types of session I currently offer, or want to offer.

What thinking about all these tools has revealed to me, is that my teaching takes a very set format: communicating information through a combination of visual and audio channels, and then asking students to try things themselves. This is a combination of the kind of session I find easy to deliver, and the kind of session I am asked to deliver. Perhaps a long-term goal should be to break out of that box a little!

My publications in Mendeley

This blog is part of 23 Things for Professional Development, a course encouraging information professionals to explore online tools.

Thing 14 is referencing tools, and we’ve been specifically encouraged to try the free tools Zotero, Mendeley and CiteULike. I’ve had varying degrees of experience with these different tools, as an ex-researcher and academic librarian. Zotero, I tried when it first came out, but didn’t really take to managing my references in my browser. I watched a video about the updates it’s had, and it’s still not really appealing to me. CiteULike, well, I use it for collections of references occasionally, but find it a little basic in its referencing functionality for ‘proper’ writing. I have a personal and a work account, but I don’t really exploit its social networking features very much.

For my day-to-day referencing needs I use Endnote, having started with this during my early PhD (in about 2003/4) and stuck with it since. I’ve usually been a student or a member of staff at one academic institution or another which supported Endnote since then, so I’ve never been forced to explore free alternatives in any depth.

However, in the spirit of trying new things, I decided to give Mendeley a go. I’ve seen this in action in sessions at work, but I’ve never experimented with it myself in any depth. I’m actually revisiting a past project currently, so I had a genuine purpose for using it (which I’ve found really helps you get to grips with a referencing system) and you can import your Endnote Library into it, so it allowed me to build on what I already had. Here’s my main thoughts:

• The pdf import (drag and drop into the Mendeley interface) is a really great function. It doesn’t always work perfectly, though, and I found one of my own publications in the online catalogue in a massively inaccurate format.
• If you have any publications, then you can ‘claim’ them, which is a function that I really like (CiteULike lets you do something similar).
• As a copyright-aware librarian type I really liked that I could use the desktop version to organise my pdfs locally, but didn’t have to share these online.
• There’s an active Mendeley userbase in my institution, so I found brilliant instructions from an academic and one of our library systems team on setting it up to search our electronic holdings.
• It looks much slicker than Endnote, and works much more smoothly; even despite Endnote 15′s recent addition of pdf annotation, it makes Endnote look clunky.
• Like so many of the free tools described in CPD23, I can’t actually use the desktop tool at work, as it requires local software installation, and I don’t have the rights.
• I’ve heard that it’s reliability isn’t always brilliant, which makes me a bit nervous. Reliability is something that I really want from a referencing solution (even if it’s something I never really get!)

Online and offline collaboration spaces are a little different

This blog is part of 23 Things for Professional Development, a course encouraging information professionals to explore online tools. The current post is in ‘Bitesize’* format.

Online collaboration and filesharing (namely Google Docs, wikis and Dropbox are the tools considered in Thing 13. I’ve used all of these in my time, but don’t really think I’ve used any of them to collaborate to the degree afforded. Google Docs and Dropbox I almost entirely use to share with myself (i.e. for file storage in the cloud) except for my running spreadsheet, which I share with my partner. Wikis, well, I’ve contributed to wikis developed by others, but usually only adding a small element to a well-structured whole.

The main reason for my lack of use of these tools is that I usually only collaborate on documents in the workplace, and there we are expected to use folders on shared drives to store files. I know these services are there, and I’m hoping I’d spot the scenario in which to use them should it arise!

*A truncated post to allow me to briefly consider CPD23 Themes I didn’t have the chance to investigate more deeply.

Doesn't look very social.

This blog is part of 23 Things for Professional Development, a course encouraging information professionals to explore online tools. The current post is in ‘Bitesize’* format.

‘Putting the ‘social’ into social media’ is the theme for Thing 12. Social media is all about the social side for me, and I love both meeting new contacts in the library world through online networks, and consolidating relationships with those I’ve met offline. My challenge for this week is to add someone new to a social network, but I’ve already added new contacts on Twitter and Google Plus this week, and do most weeks.

CPD23 hasn’t really expanded my social networks much (perhaps a little during the online chat I participated in for Things 6 and 7) but mostly consolidated relationships with those I already knew. I think that’s i) because I have been pretty active online over time and ii) due to constraints on the number of relationships one can sustain – see Dunbar’s number for a theoretical perspective on this! However, I think social media in general has been crucial for my development as a professional, in particular for helping me to feel part of a wider librarian community than my immediate workplace.

*A truncated post to allow me to briefly consider CPD23 Themes I didn’t have the chance to investigate more deeply.

One of the most organised things I've ever received through the post.

This blog is part of 23 Things for Professional Development, a course encouraging information professionals to explore online tools. The current post is in ‘Bitesize’* format.

Google Calendar (Thing 8) and Evernote (Thing 9) are both tools for organising myself (or at least my materials).

My Google Calendar has been up and running for years now, and I use it to record all my personal schedule, which I also share with my partner. It is how we organise our lives. Work uses Outlook, so I use the Calendar in that. There’s no way of synching these two calendars, which constantly frustrates me. Our library / institution just isn’t supportive of the cloud.

Evernote – well, rather than signing up myself I asked my office mate, Emma, to try and sell this to me. It’s a sort of e-scrapbook. Emma finds it absolutely invaluable for recording materials and making online notes, especially while she’s mobile. But I just don’t have the need that this software meets. Scribbling down notes is the only thing I have a burning need to do offline! Tough luck Evernote.

*A truncated post to allow me to briefly consider CPD23 Themes I didn’t have the chance to investigate more deeply.

Shot of my old PC at work, whence I networked.

This blog is part of 23 Things for Professional Development, a course encouraging information professionals to explore online tools.

Thing 6, Online Networking covers a bunch of online social networks of which I am already a member. Namely, LinkedIn, Facebook, LISNPN, the Librarians as Teachers network, and CILIP Communities. I’ve linked to all my profiles on these networks, in case any CPD23ers are interested in adding me on them. You’ll see the one exception to this is Facebook: I use this for personal rather than professional networking.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been looking at these profiles a little bit and thinking about how I use them. There was some discussion which prompted this in the online chat CPD23 I participated in earlier this week. That was a little bit Thing 6, a little bit Thing 7 (face-to-face networking)!

Professional Networks

LinkedIn is where I really see myself networking professionally online, but during the chat it occurred to me that my profile is actually fairly static (I mostly maintain my profile as an enhanced professional CV). I’ve made the effort to join a bunch more groups this week in the hope that this will prompt me to be a little bit more dynamic! I did have a similar account on the network Naymz, which I found out today had been rebranded Visible.me. It’s not something I used or updated much, so I’ve done a little bit of housekeeping and deleted my profile.

I’m a member of both LISNPN and LATNetwork, and I think they’re both great ideas, but I don’t interact on them as much as I’d like. There’s a fair amount of lurking going on on both, I suspect, as neither is highly active, with LISNPN (which has greater numbers) seeming a little more so. However, I like being part of both as I think the topics which are discussed are important. Similarly, I’m not particularly active on CILIP Communities, but I think it’s important to be part of that space and have the option of engaging with conversations when they are happening.

Academic Networks

There’s another category of social network that isn’t mentioned in Thing 6 as it isn’t relevant to all information professionals, and those are academic networks. I’ve got an Academia.edu account which is static in a similar way to my LinkedIn account. Academia.edu is a site where the academics and postgraduate research students I support have accounts, and so it’s nice to put myself in that space, and demonstrate that I’m also a researcher. On a related note, I have a Researcher ID which allows me to promote my own identity as a researcher, and test some of the features in Web of Knowledge it provides. Just like with LinkedIn and Naymz I was also half-heartedly maintaining a ResearchGate account alongside Academia.edu, but it wasn’t getting any use, so I’ve given that the chop as well.

So what’s the winner?

At the moment, LinkedIn is the king of all these accounts for me, and it’s where I’ve made the most connections by a landslide. It’s also a place where I interact with contacts from my pre-library life, so I think it gives a broad picture of my experience and skills. Most of the other networks I maintain because I think it’s important for me to join the discussions which happen in those spaces, rather than because I get a huge amount out of them, and the relationships I do have in them are usually maintained in Twitter.

The new challenger is definitely Google Plus. In fact, I just went onto it to get my profile address, and then got stuck reading things for ten minutes until I remembered what I was doing, suggesting it’s pretty compelling. I love that the circles feature allows me to interact with different kinds of people in very different ways, and I’ve already got a lot of friends, librarians, academics and others in circles of various kinds. The main thing I think it might be missing is a way to form a self-nominated group, otherwise it could pretty much cover all the networks I use. One to keep an eye on.

Current awareness is how I stay connected to the information professional community, not isolated in an ivory tower.

This blog is part of 23 Things for Professional Development, a course encouraging information professionals to explore online tools.

Thing 4, current awareness, is primarily encouraging me to use tools I already use, i.e. Twitter and Google Reader. They’re actually my primary sources of current awareness information, with the exception of emails and my friends / colleagues. I’m now following the bundle of CPD23 participants in Google Reader, and I’ll probably dip into it occasionally.

I could probably do slightly better at arranging lists in Twitter: I currently have one for my non-work friends, and one private one of the information professionals whose feeds I particularly want to follow, plus I follow lists made by others covering the organisations in which I’ve worked. In Google Reader I have grouped my feeds into information on the bibliographic databases I support, general library, academic and science sections, and individual information professional (and shambrarian) blogs. These simple approaches work for me, and even when I don’t have much chance to check these accounts, there’s always the train journey to and from work.

I’ve never whole-heartedly entered the world of services like Pushnote. It’s somewhere between a bookmarking service and Facebook. My immediate response is quite intense hatred! Everything seems to happen in a little ghetto in the top right of my window, and I’m fairly certain it didn’t find all my Twitter friends, even though I let it have access to my account. Finally, I can’t use it on most computers at work as it’s not Internet Explorer compatible, and a tool has to have immediate appeal for me to break through that barrier. I’ll come back and leave a comment if I change my mind over the next few days!

My desk: a mixture of professionalism and junk?

This blog is part of 23 Things for Professional Development, a course encouraging information professionals to explore online tools.

I already started thinking about my personal brand during week 2 of CPD23, when another participant commented on how my blog and website appeared to someone who didn’t know me. Long story short, I come across as professional (score!) but also a little bit serious, which is a bit more of a mixed blessing!

Me and My Site

This got me thinking about the history of my website came about. I created its first version in around 2003, before the concept of social media had really started to catch on. It was a combination of a place to put up information about myself, such as my CV, and a place for me to practice my html. I guess this is history is part of what gives the site its serious flavour!

Am I happy with this? Well, yes and no. Having looked a bit at my blog with fresh eyes I decided it was very dry, and I at least needed to add a picture of myself (already done). I’m also considering making my blog my front page on the site. I don’t think too much of a redesign is possible as I hand-code the site in html (except for the WordPress blog, where I hand-code the template!) and don’t have much time to make changes currently. I know there’s mixed opinion about the need for having a personal website at all in the social media era, and I know the URL I have chosen is impossible to remember, but I do love my site, and I like reminding myself I can use markup language occasionally!

My Visibility and Web Presence

The pay-off for having maintained my own website for a while is that I do quite well in Google searches for my name. I knew this already as I search for myself quite a lot! Part of this is to keep an eye on how visible I am, but I also teach searching techniques and different search engines. As I know what tends to come up about me, I find searching for myself a useful way to compare and contrast different sets of search results!

In searches, there’s a few other Katie Frasers with quite high visibility: especially the one who works for ‘Take a Break’ magazine! Generally, my website features highly across search engines, as do my Twitter account, my Linked In page and my Academic.edu page, all of which I update fairly regularly. For some reason, Google is the only search engine which offers another Katie Fraser’s Linked In page first. I tend to fit the way my style to the kind of service I’m using. On Linked In I’m professional, and on Twitter, I post a mixture of personal and professional stuff. I’m not consistent with my profile pictures, but I do always use a picture of my face, and my face IS consistent!

Generally, I’m quite happy with the way I appear online. I do concentrate more on my professional identity in things I post on the open net, and save my more personal thoughts for either places where my information is quite locked down (such as Facebook) or for face-to-face encounters. However, I don’t think anyone reading my Twitter account would think that I’m always a serious person!