cdp thing what????

Yikes, I’m way behind – let’s see if I can catch up before the end… so hard to keep up when I have no internet access at home – that’s something I have in common with many of my students and many public library patrons (or clients or, um, users…).  Face it, I can give lots of excuses over the past 6 or 7 weeks for not keeping up but that’s the beauty of asynchrony:  I can do it later! 

And tell me, when is that meeting of the Procrastinators’ Support Group?  Next week?  How about the week after that?  I hope I can remember to be there… feeling defensive, I’ll just say beans were picked, zucchini was picked, the grass was mowed, several times, right up until the mower burst into flame – and the blueberries were picked, eaten & extras frozen. 

 

cpd Thing 7

Professional organizations!  I follow ALA and NYLA (New York Library Assoc.) so that I can see what issues others in my field have to deal with – it helps to see how others solve the problems I have.  CPD has listed many groups based in the Isles – nice to know about but not as useful to me individually.   Checking them over, I wondered if there are equivalents to School Library Media Section (SLMS), a subset of ALA or ENYSLMA -think that’s it- which is a subset of NYLA.  (Get your alphabet soup here!)  School Library Journal (SLJ!) is a wonderful publication with great articles and hundreds of book reviews each month (well, 11 times/year): this is a great help with collection development.  Really makes me wish I had more to spend on books for the collection… I get online newsletters from School Library Journal and Library Journal: both of these help to keep me connected.  I’m also part of a listserv that is helpful, time-consuming, and international.  I’ve had some interesting online ‘conversations.’  Some have been from librarians quite near and some from a thousand miles away.

The international groups look interesting.  I like World Cat for the ability to search academic library collections and find the nearest copy of a book.  More to investigate there.

cpd thing 6

Busy busy!  This ‘thing’ had lots of things to do and I’ve only seen the first half, I think – so:

LinkedIn: looks like this one is serious… an online CV posting site.  I’m not in the market for a new job and have what I think are pretty good connections but can see that this would be extremely useful to get your professional stats and accomplishments out there.  The basic package is free. 

Librarians as Teachers network: sounds promising but some of the discussions seemed pretty old.  Further investigations warranted.

FaceBook: so many people, so little to say… excuse me, but really, what are they all saying????  Wait, I can see that you can contact a group of people all at once so that’s quicker than going old school and say, actually telephoning ‘friends’ and speaking with them.  This will be useful to get the word out about events and announcements.   A good way for followers to keep up with what’s coming up.

Twitter: hey, what are you having for lunch?  for quick communications, here’s your site.  Another way to get the word out.

cpd thing 5

my reflective practice:

what’s out there? -> what’s it to me?  -> how can I use this? 

So far: thing 1 – made a new blog, discovered another blog I had hope to rejuvenate from last fall has had its parent site hacked and my lovely password  (which I had a hard time recalling anyway) was stolen along with bazillions of others.  What’s up with that?  Would the hacker have picked my pocket if next to me?  Well, have some pocket lint!  What would my application be here?  I already have another blog I’m using for cpd23.  And I can and will) make a new one to add to my work web site to get the word out to my students about new books – I originally thought I’d have students contribute but that didn’t work out.  I can just write about books I read & think will be interesting to my students.  I like writing about what I read but I’ll have to work at fitting it into my schedule.  I like skipping around in the blogosphere so the verdict is Cake!

Thing 2: loved reading others blogs – what a great collection!  I haven’t commented on too many but others have found me!  (I’m not alone anymore ;-0  thank you, universe!)  So many great blogs!  So many great ideas to put to use here!  The verdict?  fun to read, gets me feeling creative to see how others have done things – it’s almost like bouncing ideas back and forth with colleagues  So the verdice would be cake with that yummy fudge type frosting! 

Thing 3: My brand – scary to check up on what’s out there about me but on the other hand, not much to see here, folks, move along…  The worry was worse than the reality (and ain’t that usually the way!).  I realized that what’s out there can be subdivided into 5 categories:  (of course i’m going to sort things into categories – it’s what i do!) school library (work) website, public library volunteering, concerts I’ve been part of, family obits in which my name appears (as a survivor – there is no truth to the rumor that I am a zombie), and by far the largest category – pieces of my name found in other peoples’ names.   This is sort of a Frankenstein effect.  Verdict:  hmmm-I am more aware of how info about me might be presented.  So is there cake?  Well, it couldn’t have been easier to find info about me so there is cake but it’s a flavor I don’t particularly care for. 

thing 4: RSS feeds, Twitter, Pushnote.  Love those RSS feeds – my own personal organizing service!  My dad used to send me clippings from the newspaper where he lived – there were articles about education, libraries and, not intentionally to give me the heebie-jeebies but still, articles about bears interacting badly with people and pets.  Feed the birds at the wrong time of the year and attract the hungry, ill-tempered (in early spring or late fall) black bear who just wants to eat everything in sight.   Leave any edibles in your car?  A black bear can open a car by pushing in the window…  Your dog out on the porch with a bowl of kibble could become a snack for a black bear.  Thanks, Dad, I had gotten over that fear of the dark instilled by my four older brothers but it’s back!  So getting RSS feeds is cake, in comparison.  Twitter is easy – I hope to use it for book tweets in conjunction with my website.  Not sure how many students use it.  No verdict until school opens again.  Still to try: Pushnote but I don’t have the “right” browser so that’s for the future.

thing 4 cpd23

Well tweet this!  I signed up for twitter (easy) but sort of wonder if I’ll have time to pay attention to messages.  I like that the tweets are short and that I can pick and choose from among the gazillions of tweets that are flying around the ether… should be a fairly easy way to contact my students – if they are allowed to tweet on school’s network.  Of course, there’s always face-to-face.

cdp thing 3

Read the ‘creating a brand’ articles linked to thing 3 – I somewhat foolishly thought if I stayed off social networking sites, I’d maintain my status as a private citizen.   No, no, no.

Oh, my – I didn’t think I had much of a presence on the web…  but there are many pages with much repetition.  Kinda creepy (big brothery – who knew someone was compiling all this?) but maybe not as bad as I thought.  I have several work-related items (web-site, blog comments), some volunteer efforts (public library related – library board, friends news, fundraising), several musical items (fiddling!  playing for contras and squares -wait, that would be square dances, concerts), some personal ones (obits for family members, mentions of relatives in various places), and the not-me-but-parts-of-my-name results.  

There seem to be lots of web sites that would like to sell someone info about me.  Who would buy this info??  And can I just say “lay off” right now?

cpd23things

So I just finished the CDLC’s “10 things” last week.  Our lovely leader urged us to keep going with cdp 23 Things for Professional Development.  I want to continue to play with these new tools – and keep learning.  I am about at the end of my school year: only 4 more days but who’s counting?

Thing 10 Future trends again

In 2020, I hope we will all have access to smaller, less expensive computers.  (remember those giant, room sized computers?) More online resources  (won’t everything be online?) and we will have to figure out how to pay for them!  Having more may bring down the price through competition but that model where a library can only lend an e-book 26 times might kill us…

Opportunities to take better advantage of:  I’m really getting after my students to use the public library as a supplement to our collection.  Our databases give them the world on a daily basis but some don’t appreciate that.  Not sure what we’ll have to give up – (maybe paper)everything just seems to keep getting added on to what we do and what we offer.   I’m not much of a futurist.  I’m still slogging through the present!  There’s so much of it, too!

Thing 10 – Future trends

Read Joyce Valenza’s Manifesto for 21st Century Librarians.  When does that woman sleep????   But I love her – she is up on everything and so generously shares it with everyone.  That’s who I want to be when I grow up.  I like her ideas about an information landscape (it’s out there!) and expanding the idea of collection developement to include all kinds of media.   I’ve learned so many ways to collaborate (Thanks, Polly and Joyce!) now.  Just think, did we know any of this 10 years ago?  (I did not! but how much fun were Inanimate Alice or the Moving Tales?  How did I miss that?)  I do some of the things she suggests we’ll all be doing: lending cameras, laptops, flash sticks – for those who need them, I can help to level that playing field a little – and I expand my hours in the afternoons (unpaid, natch) so kids who need ’em can use our computers.  I try to use my website to ‘organize the web’ so kids can find good info and not get bogged down in rotty old links – of course, I hope they read, look at my displays (physical and virtual), evaluate everything and build knowledge.  But there’s so much more for me to learn and do – full employment forever in the information industry!  And what will we be doing five or ten years from now?  I don’t know but I know I will keep learning about it!  I felt this way when I first studied children’s lit.  I thought I had read a lot of books – but boy-oh-boy did my knowledge base expand – expand, heck, try explode!  That was the first time I felt like my course grade didn’t matter since my learning was so extreme.  It was like I could feel my brain growing! 

Thanks, PollyAlida – great resources and your depth of knowledge is astounding.  Glad to be part of this and I still want to keep digging deeper into what we’ve done.  I think I could keep going on this for a long time.

Thing 9 : e-books again

I like the idea of the ease of portability of e-books.  The freebies sound good, too, bless my Scots heritage!  I’m thinking I will purchase a Nook or Kindle for myself.  Students have them, faculty have them – all seem to enjoy them.  But wouldn’t an iPad be more versatile?  I’d like to have an all in one device so I can keep up with e-mail and work and – wait, maybe I don’t want to be that accessible.  I worked pt in a public library and the board expected the director to be available 24/7 because she had e-mail.  If they e-mailed her at 10pm Sunday, they expected she would be ready for an 8am meeting on Monday.  This could make my job expand EVEN MORE!  As it is, I am finishing hour 12 today…..  happy to be employed – but tired.  And hungry.  And whining again – I gotta go with my strengths  ;^)

Professionally?  I must learn and know about new formats for books.  Most of my students see me as the go-to person about the laptops and desktops here.   Some think they know it all but then, they are teenagers… they’re so cute!