Wednesday 6 June 2012

Thing 5 Reflective Practice

My awareness of reflective practice increased when I did my MA in Library and Information Management.  Although not termed ‘reflective practice’ I have done this for several years within my employment.  As a school librarian each year I have had to write a departmental development plan and this is based on the three components of reflective practice: Review, Plan, Do.

The whole process, and my increased development as a reflective practitioner, grew when I undertook the Chartership programme.  Those who have undertaken the programme will be all too aware of the requirement for candidates to demonstrate their ability to reflect on what they have done and learned from any particular activity.  When doing this, the thing that I initially found difficult was writing in a reflective manner.  I guess that I had got into the habit of writing for the university and changing to the reflective personal style, using the personal pronoun (I), seemed difficult at first.

Being reflective allows us to evaluate what we have done and consider ways to develop and improve upon our performance in the future.  It’s a good way of learning.  Recording ideas in such as a journal, even a blog, enables thoughts to be revisited at a later date.  The skills involved in becoming a reflective practitioner can be developed over time and these can have a positive impact on the individual and their library service.

Friday 1 June 2012

Thing 4 Current Awareness

I’ve heard of RSS years ago, but never used it before.  I’d seen the icons on sites such as the BBC’s news pages but didn’t know how to actually use them.  Having set up the google reader account I can see the value of having information feeds in one place, and the process of developing this is relatively simply to do.

It appears to be extremely valuable for keeping track of blogs that you follow.  Being able to organise them in folders and see updated items makes the process of reading them quite efficient.

Twitter is also new to me.  Personally I prefer to write articles rather than snippets and I feel the same about reading, but I can see it has some use.  For example, I looked at the CILIP’s New Professionals Day 2012 tag, but didn’t feel that this compared with conference notes found on blogs or presentations that can be read elsewhere on such as slideshare or prezi.  Maybe I’ll have to spend more time using the site and investigating what’s out there.

I do feel that I have learned new skills as I can now use these tools, which previously I hadn’t made use of.  I think that they are both useful, along with storify, for current awareness and for organising and keeping track of items of interest.