Final Reflection - Week 13

At the beginning of this unit I felt very apprehensive about blogging and the amount of work I felt it was going to take to complete the blogs on time. I tried to nominate my blogs so that I would have some time at the end of semester to review them and focus on the proposal and assignments for other subjects. The blogs I chose to write were:

Play: weeks 5 6 7 8 9
Reflect: weeks 4 7 9 10 11

I was looking forward to learning about various information programs and interested to see how they could be incorporated into a library environment. I was unfamiliar with a number of these programs and thoroughly enjoyed playing around with them and writing about them. I believe I would have gotten more out of this course if the play activities were mandatory for all of the programs. I definitely learned better by interacting with the programs I was required to use for my blogging activity, but I didn’t find myself motivated enough to explore the programs that fell outside my blogging schedule.

As for the reflect activities, while I was engaged with what I was writing about, I often found a disconnect between how the particular reflect activity was related to an information program. If I had my time over again, I would choose weeks where the play and reflect activities corresponded with each other. I felt like I was getting a wholesome experience with my week 7 (Creative Commons & Instagram)  and 9 posts (Mobile & QR Codes). I liked discussing theory and applying a program to that theory rather than just writing a reflection or just doing a play activity separately.

My favorite reflect activity was the final post I did on mash-ups. I liked writing about creative commons and looking through all the pictures on the Library Hack website. I believe it was my favorite because it still required me to complete an activity and then comment on it. It helps that creative commons is an interesting subject to investigate in terms of libraries.

It is hard to choose my favorite play activity because I enjoyed engaging with the different information programs. The play activity which surprised me the most was the week 8 screen-casting program. At the beginning of the activity I was very doubtful of my abilities, but as I progressed and worked out a plan for my screen-cast I began to gain confidence and realised that engaging with these activities means just having a go.

I enjoyed commenting on peer blogs, but I found it hard to consistently post on the majority of my classmates blogs. It was difficult to access posts by my classmates unless they specifically linked them to the Facebook group page. I utilised the rolling blog feed via the Blackboard site, but because it was a rolling feed I was only able to see the most recent posts. In the future, I think it would be better to have one static page with everyone’s blog posted so we can systematically make sure that everyone in class has at least one comment on their work.

I believe commenting on people’s blog is helpful for the learning process but I don’t believe the assessment weighting on 20% is appropriate unless there were more guidelines ie. 10 compulsory posts. I valued the interaction with my peers, especially on the Facebook page. I liked having a semi-informal gathering space for us to ask questions about assignments and link each other to interesting news articles. I didn’t engage with Twitter as much, simply because I check Facebook every day. If we had whole class activities specific to Twitter I would have engaged with that program more.

The key take-away I have from this unit is that there are a lot of free programs out there for librarians to find and implement in their work. I liked that these programs were for the most part, easy to use and valuable for a personal and library setting. I learned not to doubt my abilities and to always try new things. I also increased my knowledge of blogging and commenting through participating in this course.

Overall, I enjoyed this course and the blogs that went with it. My initial apprehension was for nothing as the act of blogging became a weekly project I looked forward to completing. My major concern, however, is for the final assignment as the proposal has seemingly come out of no-where. Hopefully I can manage my time better in the future.

Mobile - Week 9

For the PLAY activity this week we were asked to create our own QR code and post it to our blog. A QR code is something like a barcode which allows mobile users to scan it and then receive information on their smart phone. The activity this week was my first experience with QR codes and I found it quite enjoyable!

Participating in this activity and previous activities (Instagram comes to mind) has made me come to realise how important smart phones have become in our world. I am a new smart phone user, it was actually starting my Masters that prompted me to update from my Nokia "brick" to Samsung Galaxy. One of the reasons I opted for Samsung over the iPhone was that it had a bigger screen which I find perfect for reading material on the go. I can check my emails, message my friends internationally, take a photo if I see something interesting, and call my family... all from one device. It's like having my own personal computer in my pocket.

I think the point of going mobile is to create more opportunities for yourself with a small gadget. When I found out that many librarians use Twitter as a form of keeping up with industry knowledge I was pleasantly surprised. I can keep up now too from my phone! I can't say enough about the benefits of my smart phone both in my personal and professional life. The only downside to having a phone constantly by my side is that... it is constantly by my side. I find myself checking my email or Facebook or Twitter absently when I am waiting for the train to Brisbane.

Microblogging - Week 3

I think I like the idea of Twitter more than Twitter itself. As a microblogging site, I believe Twitter perfectly encompasses everything one could need from social media. It provides countless networking opportunities, messages of up to 140 characters can be directed to other people or be sent out to no-one in particular, and links to pictures or other websites can be shared simply.





The problem I have with Twitter is the two worlds which form the Twitter community; the professional users and the personal users. Professionals use Twitter to increase their industry knowledge while personal users post just about everything else...




Personally, I aim to keep my Twitter account for purely professional contacts. The majority of people I follow on Twitter are related to the LIS industry in some way. The idea of using my Twitter account for both personal and professional reasons is very unappealing to me. Because of the nature and popularity of Twitter, I find the high frequency of tweets to be somewhat overwhelming. By keeping my account professional I do not need to wade through ‘pointless’ personal messages to get to industry specific information. Some people suggest having a separate account for personal use, but I think other social media sites ie. Facebook, are better for personal connections.





I will continue to use Twitter beyond this unit, it is a great resource for industry information as well as networking. In my learning it will allow me to become more aware of what is happening in the LIS community both in Australia and internationally. I love Twitter for it’s ease of use and networking opportunities but I hate Twitter for blurring the lines between personal and professional worlds. Part of me wishes that Twitter was a site purely for professional connections, however the simple concept of Twitter (140 characters!!!) is so ingenious that I’ll just have to keep using it.


For further reading, Dianne Kollman has written a blog for The Huffington Post on the benefits of Twitter here.