Thing 5 - Reflective Practice

Reflection of Hope by ecotist on Flickr

Thing 5 already? Yes indeed! Thing 5 is Reflective Practice. As you’ve been working through ‘the things’ you may have learnt how to use some new tools or had a refresher on the tools that you use already. You may have been encouraged to restart abandoned blogs or join Twitter with a clearer understanding of your online presence and what you want people to know about you. You may have taken steps to get some more current awareness on the go by setting up some RSS feeds. Whatever you have got out of 23 things for professional development so far take a bit of time this week to reflect.

What is reflective practice?
This post is by no means an in depth piece defining and examining the theories of reflective practice, but more of an introduction to how to get going with it yourself. If you do want a more in depth look into reflective practice I’ve included some references at the end of post.

I see reflective practice as an important part of not only our professional, but personal development. It provides an opportunity to review the experiences we have, learning from them and applying what we have learnt.

How do I become a reflective practitioner?
Everyone will have their own style and preferred process of reflective practice, this is just one idea for you to consider based on the already existing models out there.

I’m all for simplicity so these models appeal to me most:



Greenaway 1995



Borton 1970



You’ll find a model that works for you, it might be that you adapt an already existing one like these examples.


I go through the following three steps when I’m embarking on a bit of reflective writing.

1. Recall it: this could be an event you’ve participated in, a project group you’ve been part of, a workshop you’ve delivered, an enquiry you’ve responded to…


2. Evaluate it: Take some time to consider these questions
What did you learn?
What did you enjoy?
What worked well?
What, if anything, went wrong?
What would you change?
What (potential) impact could this have in your workplace?


3. Apply it: Take some action. What can you practically apply from the experience you’ve had?

Tools for reflective practice

sewing tool box by levanah on Flickr

There are a variety of tools available to you for your reflective practice activities. Just as the process of reflective practice may vary from person to person, the tools used may also differ.


As you’re participating in the 23 things, Thing 1, a blog, is a perfect tool for communicating the evaluating part of the reflective practice process. Blogs are a great way to share your thoughts. The reason me and my colleague @sarahjison set up our blog (Librariansontheloose) was to give us a space to reflect on and evaluate when I was working towards CILIP chartership. Now I am chartered I'm in the habit of going through this reflective process and having the blog still remains a good way of doing that.There are of course more tools including drawing, audio-visual, podcasting.


Are there any difficulties in becoming a reflective practitioner?
Yes! The most common seems to be time. We all have busy lives, so being realistic about what you can reflect on is important. If you are able to factor it into your everyday work activities, great. If not, be selective.


Reflective writing can also be a challenge, but resources to address this are plentiful online. If you’re an information professional based in the UK keep an eye out for reflective writing workshops organised by the Career Development Group, Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). If you’re based in another country see if your professional body organises any similar events or put it to your employer as an opportunity for your professional development.


Sometimes the most difficult part of being a successful reflective practitioner is the application of what you’ve learnt.

paper chain/ find a way to wear
the journal by SlipStreamJC on flickr

Why should I bother with reflective practice?Being a reflective practitioner does have its challenges, but it also has its rewards. Amongst other things being a reflective practitioner can…

• Help you be more objective about experiences
• Give you more control over your learning and development
• Help you demonstrate you are active and responsive
• Give you a better understanding of your work

So, there we go, a whistlestop introduction to reflective practice. Give it a try. Have a think about your approach to reflective practice. If you’ve any tips or resource to share, please do.

Want to know more? Try these…

Books/Theses

Bolton, G (2001) Reflective Practice: writing and professional development, Paul Chapman.
Borton, T (1970) Reach, Touch, and Teach: Student Concerns and Process Education, McGraw-Hill.
Boud D, Keogh R and Walker D (1985) Reflection, Turning Experience into Learning, Routledge.

Schön, D (1983) The Reflective Practitioner, How Professionals Think In Action, Basic Books.

Greenaway, R (1995) Powerful Learning Experiences in Management Learning and Development: A study of the experiences of managers attending residential development training courses at the Brathay Hall Trust (1988-9). The University of Lancaster, Centre for the Study of Management Learning.

Blogs


A wonderful blog post from a 23 things participant, Elaine Andrew, about attending a reflective writing workshop. 
Random musings of a librarian, almost
Reflective writing workshop

Another fantastic blog post giving an insight into the difficulties of reflective practice from another 23 things participant!
Nataliafay. Librarian. Human.
Getting out of the reflective practice rut

This is from a teaching/education perspective, but still relevant to us as information professionals
Thoughts on learning processes and other musings
Understanding Reflective Practice 


Presentations

A lovely introduction to reflective practice from Toby Adams
The Purpose of Reflective Practice

Another good introduction to reflective practice from Sarah Stewart
Journaling as a tool for reflective practice

*Images of reflective practice models
Greenaway (1995)
[Accessed 25/05/2012]

Borton (1970)
[Accessed 25/05/2012]

Images
The images in the post are available for use from Flickr under the Creative Commons Licence.
Reflection of Hope - ecotist
Sewing tool box - levanah
paper chain/find a way to wear the journal - SlipStreamJC

Meet other cpd23 participants!

Some local professional groups have started organising events specifically for, or open to, cpd23 participants.  We'll keep a list of them here.  If you know of such an event, let us know and we'll add the details.

Forthcoming events: 

London, Tuesday 12 June
Hannah is organising a meet-up for people in London on 12 June.  It'll be in the courtyard of Somerset House, meeting at the Fernandez & Wells cafe from 6pm.  Full details are available on Hannah's blog.  All are welcome.

Oxford, Wednesday 13 June
Meeting for participants and other library folk from 5.15pm in the Mitre on the High Street.

Cambridge, Thursday 14 June
The CILIP East of England branch is organising an informal networking evening at the Boathouse Pub.  It's open to everyone, whether or not you're a CILIP member or a CPD23 participant.  Full details on the East of England branch blog.

Wolverhampton, Thursday 14 June
The CILIP West Midlands branch is organising an informal networking evening from 6pm at The Moon Under Water (near the rail and bus station).  It's open to everyone, whether or not you're a CILIP member or a CPD23 participant. Full details on the CILIP West Midlands branch blog.

Past events:

Brighton, Wednesday 16 May
Inaugural Sussex Library Tweetup, from 7.30pm onwards.  For "librarians, shambrarians, library assistants and information ninjas of every stripe. A chance to meet some of the wonderful people working in our region, socialise and share ideas and experiences. Vegetarian food available until 9pm, free wifi. Non-tweeters welcome!".

Cardiff, Wednesday 16 May

CLIC (Cardiff: Libraries in Co-operation) is organising an information meet-up for anyone participating in, or thinking about participating in, the cpd23 course.  It's happening on the evening of Wednesday 16th May, in Cardiff, and is open to anyone in the area.

Full details are available on Kristine's blog, here: Cardiff CPD23 meet-up.

Glasgow, Friday 18 May
SALCTG (the Scottish Academic Libraries Cooperative Training Group) has invited cpd23 participants to come along to their 'Cellos and Bellows' visit to the libraries of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Glasgow Piping Centre this Friday lunchtime and afternoon.  Full details, including how to sign up, are available on the SALCTG blog.

Thing 4: Current awareness - Twitter, RSS and Storify

Welcome to Thing 4! In this Thing we'll explore a few tools that will help you to keep up-to-date and aware of goings on in the library and information world, and make it easy to share news and stories with others. The three tools we have chosen to explore are Twitter, RSS feeds and Storify. However if there are any other tools you use for a similar purpose, feel free tell us all about it when you blog about this Thing!

Twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows you to publish short updates of up to 140 characters. Users follow other users to subscribe to each other's updates. All the updates from the users you follow will be aggregated in to one timeline that appears when you log in to the site.

Although a common belief is that Twitter is filled with celebrities tweeting about what they had for lunch, in reality few users actually use the service to send updates about the minutiae of their everyday activities, instead preferring to use it to network and share ideas or interesting things they have seen around the web. This is what makes Twitter such a valuable tool for those of us wanting to improve our current awareness.

If you already have an account, skip this paragraph! If you don't already use Twitter, follow the easy steps below to create your account and begin tweeting:

1. Go to www.twitter.com and follow the steps to create an account.
2. Once you have created your account you will be taken to your Twitter homepage where you can update your profile to include a short biography, a link to your blog and a profile picture. We recommend that you leave the Twitter Privacy box unchecked because this means other CPD23 participants can read your tweets. You can always change this at any time.
3. Now post your first update. Click in the status box on the left of the screen where it says "Compose new tweet..." Write a comment, maybe something about your participation in the 23 Things programme. You are restricted to 140 characters, and as you type you will see the number at the top right of the box decrease. Leave enough characters to add #cpd23 at the end. This is known as a hashtag and allows Twitter users to group tweets by subject. By adding #cpd23 to your tweet your comment will be picked up by other participants. Once you click "Update", this tweet will be added to your timeline, and anyone who follows you will be able to see your tweet.
4. Search for @CPD23 (or click here) and click "follow". Now our tweets will appear in your timeline!

Being able to view all updates using a particular hashtag has made Twitter a valuable tool for following conferences. For example, if you wished you'd had the chance to go to CILIP's New Professionals Information Day, here are all the tweets from conference-goers: #CILIPnpd12. Another use for the hashtag is for holding real-time Twitter chats on a particular topic. Great examples of this are #libchat, which is held every Wednesday at 8-9.30pm EST, and #uklibchat, held every other Tuesday, 6.30-8.30 GMT.

Once you have been tweeting for a while and have built up a few followers, Twitter can be really handy for asking questions. To help me with this blog post I asked my followers who their top 3 Twitter accounts were for LIS news and information. (I also asked them to "retweet" this message - commonly abbreviated as "RT" - so that it reached more people.) Based on the results of this, here are a few lists of people you might like to follow for starters, then why not try finding a few yourself! If you find someone interesting, take a look at who they follow and go from there. But follow as many or as few people as you personally can manage - current awareness is good but information overload is bad!

• List of CPD23 2012 participants (if you'd like to be added to this list, leave a comment below or tweet me @Annie_Bob)
• LIS organisations
• Public libraries
• Academic libraries
• Special libraries

RSS
RSS (commonly known as Really Simple Syndication) allows you to view new content from web sites, blog entries, etc in one place, without having to visit the individual sites. This obviously makes following library news and developments a lot easier, as all the news comes to you!

The first step you need to take when subscribing to RSS feeds is to sign up for a feed reader. There are many available but for the purposes of this programme we will use Google Reader as you have already created an account with Google. As an example of how to subscribe to a feed, let's get you subscribed to the CPD23 blog. In the right sidebar of this blog there is a "Subscribe to..." box. Click on the arrow next to "Posts", and click "Add to Google". This should take you to your Google Reader (you may need to sign in with your Google account) and you can then subscribe to this feed. From now on, whenever we post something new it will come straight to your Reader, eliminating the need to keep checking the site. You can subscribe to other blogs and news sites in a similar way, even if they don't have a subscribe button embedded in their site, most web browsers will have an RSS button - this may be up by the address bar, or in Firefox 4 this is in the bookmarks menu.

Here is a handy bundle of all the CPD23 blogs:
RSS feed of all CPD23 participants


And here are a few of my favourite blogs for keeping abreast of library news and trends (again, explore for yourself, follow your interests etc!) -

• Librarian by Day - transliteracy, digital library services
• Phil Bradley's weblog - "where librarians and the internet meet" - search engines, web 2.0 technologies
• The Wikiman - library advocacy, marketing, social media, advice for new professionals
• Infoism - IT in libraries, digital divide, library news and advocacy
• Agnostic Maybe - ebooks, library news. Hosts an "open-thread Thursday" discussion each week
• Hack Library School - a must for LIS students, "hack" your library school experience using the web as a collaborative space
• Rarely Sited - special collections and outreach
• Mashable - social media and technology news

Storify

Storify is a way of bringing together content from across the web, to create "social stories", which you can then share. It's a great way to combine different media in a nice, embeddable format. As an example, here's a simple one I made about CPD23:



When you sign up for Storify (www.storify.com), you will be prompted to sign in with Twitter or Facebook. If you don't have an account with these services, or don't want to link your accounts, don't worry, just click on the small link underneath where it says "I don't have a Twitter or Facebook account" and you will be able to create a username and password.

Once you have an account, it is very easy to create a story. The blue "Create story" button at the top right of the screen takes you to the Story Editor. You can search various social media and news sites for things to add to your story, just drag them across to the left hand panel to position them however you like. You can also add your own text. Storify also have a bookmarklet that you can add to your browser, to send content from anywhere on the web to your "Storypad", and then the next time you go to Storify they will be there waiting for you in the Story Editor. There are more instructions on this here. You can save your story and come back to it at any point, and when you are happy with it, just click "Publish" at the top and it will be made public.

Now to share your published story! Storify offers options for sharing on Twitter, Facebook, and by email, or you can simply copy the link and paste it wherever you like. If you want to embed the story in your blog or website as I did above, click on the embed tag, copy the code in the box, and then paste this bit of code into your blog post by going to the HTML view (the button to change how you are viewing your draft blog post is at the top left in Blogger's edit screen, top right for Wordpress). For Blogger users, don't worry if your embedded story appears as a weird bit of code even after you switch back to Compose view, it will show up correctly when you preview or publish your post!

To give you some inspiration, here are some ways that library and information professionals have been making use of Storify:

• Voices for the Library - Why do we love our libraries? This is why...
• @ellyob - Chartership Chat on Twitter (an especially nice use of Storify as a tool for reflection)
• Sarah Werner - Book dealers' descriptions and catalog records
• Ned Potter - What surprised you about being a subject librarian?
• and on a much more serious note, Emma Cragg - #quiffcomp12

What to do now!
To complete this Thing, blog about your experiences with these tools. Which did you find most useful and why? Have you come across any blogs or twitter accounts that you've found particularly useful for current awareness? Have other CPD23 particpants been sharing interesting content via Storify?

If you are super keen and want to explore this area further, here are a few more current awareness tools you might want to play with!

• Scoop.it - a social media curation tool like Storify, allowing you to present content in a magazine-like format. Ian Clark has written about his experiences with Scoop.it.
• Paper.li - an online "newspaper" which automatically aggregates content from social media based on searches you set up. Gary Green has written a handy post about setting one up for Voices for the Library.
•  If you have a smart phone, tablet, Kindle Fire or Nook you might want to try out Pulse News which brings your favourite news sources together in one reading application.

Images in this post by IconTexto on IconFinder.com

Thing 3: Consider your personal brand

Don't worry - branding doesn't need to be painful!

Thing 3 is about your personal brand. We'll consider how people see your online brand, what brand you would like to convey, and how to match the two.

I have a couple of confessions:

1. When I participated in CPD23 last year it took over three weeks for me to decide on a blog domain for my 23 Things for Professional Development blog.
2. It took me an hour to brand my blog the way I wanted to before I registered it with the 23 Things for Professional Development programme.

I know what some of you might be thinking; what a waste of time! Or is it? It might *only* be a blog, but it's part of my online presence, and even more crucially, it's part of my professional online presence. I want that online presence to be an accurate reflection of who I am, whether someone comes across my blog, my Twitter account, my LinkedIn account, or any of my other online professional networks. I also want to maintain consistency across different platforms.

During last year's CPD23, many people felt uncomfortable with the term 'personal branding' as it made them feel like cheesy salesmen. However, whether you're comfortable with terms like branding and marketing or not, the fact remains that you already have a personal brand. Your personal brand is what people think about when they think of you - the perception they have about you from first appearances (virtual or physical), the way you present yourself, the way you behave, the things you say, the things you're passionate about, the activities you get involved in... these all contribute to your personal brand.

So what can you do to maintain a consistent image and ensure you are portraying an accurate reflection of who you are? Consider your core values and how you can convey those messages to those who meet you in person and those who find you online. Things to consider include:

• Name used - do you have a nickname that you use in a professional or personal capacity? What do you want people to refer to you as? Try to be consistent across different platforms, and if you want people to know it's you remember to include your real name somewhere on each. If you're not using your real name, I'd recommend using something which is easy to pronounce - initials may make sense to you when you register on a web service, but won't make it easy to say when you meet people.
• Photograph - do you want people you network with online to recognise you when you meet face to face? The chances are that you do, in which case consider using a recent photograph of yourself as an identifier, rather than a cartoon or other image.
• Professional/personal identity - do you want to merge the two or do you prefer to keep them separate? Personally, I tend to take a "profersonal" approach to demonstrate both sides of my personality, but others prefer to keep different sides of their life compartmentalised.
• Visual brand - one of the easiest ways to distinguish a brand for yourself is with a clear visual identity. This could be the colours you use, or a certain style of imagery - anything to help your presence stand out as something unique and individual to you, and again remember to be consistent. I have the same purple flowers background for my blog and Twitter page, and also use this (and my penguin from my blog header) on my business cards:

Activity

Time for a bit of a vanity check. Search for your name in Google and check out the first page or so of results (try to do this in a different browser or an incognito window whilst logged out of Google to get a truly objective view - if you have a very common name you may wish to use another keyword word such as library or your country of origin alongside your name).

Do any of the search results on the first page refer to you personally? Are they the things you would want someone to find if they were looking to find out information about you? Which of your profiles come first? Is there anything about you on the results page that you wouldn't want a potential colleague/employer finding out about you?

Reflect on what you discovered and think about some of the ways you could improve your personal brand. Record your thoughts on your blog, and if there are some simple things you can change, go for it!

Optional extra activity

If you are feeling particularly brave, try asking someone else (such as one of the other programme participants) what they think your blog says about your personal brand. Are the words they suggest ones that you feel describe you? If not, consider why that might be and how you could change that perception.

Recommended reading

The Practical Librarian - Manage your brand as a librarian

Andromeda Yelton - Personal Branding for New Librarians

LibWig - What's In A Name?

Georgina Hardy - Judging a blog by its cover

Danah Boyd - Controlling your public appearance

Dave Fleet - How to ruin (or build) your personal brand

Ned Potter - You already have a brand! Here are 5 ways to influence it...

Branding iron image from vapour trail on Flickr.

Thing 2: Investigate some other blogs

(This is Thing 2 in the programme. If you've not done so already, start off at Thing 1, here.)

Now you've set off with your own blogging, it's time to meet the neighbours: see who else is taking part and what they're saying. 

First of all, you need to let other people know that you're taking part.  Do that by completing the 23 Things for Professional Development registration form if you haven't already.  You can put as much or as little information about your location and type of work as you like.  But bear in mind that what you put will help other people to find you.

At the time of writing we already have over 100 blogs signed up: you can see an alphabetical list on our participants page. You probably don't have time to visit them all, so you can refine your choices using the country and sector tags on our Delicious bookmarks.

If you think you've signed up, but don't appear in the Delicious list after a day or two, leave a comment here and we'll check what's happened.  If we could give your blog better tags, let us know that too!

Click to enlarge

Now, make sure that people can comment on your blog. In Blogger, click on 'settings' and then on 'posts and comments'. It's a good idea to say yes to 'show word verification for comments', because that helps to stop spam comments. If you say yes to 'comment moderation', you will receive an email (to the address specified) when someone comments - and you will have to approve the comment before it appears publicly on your blog.

Click to enlarge

Lastly, go and visit some blogs, read some posts and leave some comments to let the authors know what you thought. What did you enjoy about their post? Do you have similar or contrasting experience to share?  Or just say hello to let them know someone is reading!

Being able to comment and discuss ideas is what makes blogging - and social media in general - so useful and valuable as a tool for personal and professional development. Comments on your own blog can offer advice and support, they might point you towards useful resources, or they might challenge your opinions and help you refine your arguments. By commenting on other people's blog you're likely to think more deeply about what you've read and what you think about an issue, you'll also be able to share some of your expertise, and you'll get your face (or, at least your moniker) more widely known.  It can be daunting to comment on the blog of someone you may never have met, but do take the plunge, even if it's just to say hello, or to say that you enjoyed a post.

To finish Thing 2, once you've explored the cpd23 neighbourhood a little, write a post on your blog about what you've read and who you've met.

Further Reading:
If you'd like to investigate the wider world of library and librarian blogging, then why not investigate the UK Library Blogs/Bloggers Wiki, and if you know of similar sources from librarians elsewhere in the world, let us know in the comments.

Thing 1: Blogs and blogging

Welcome to 23 Things for Professional Development! This is Thing Number 1.

In this Thing you will create your own blog (if you don't have one already) and will think and write about why you're taking part in 23 Things for Professional Development and what you're hoping to get out of it.

If you're already a happy, confident blogger, you can skip to What to write for Thing 1 below. Otherwise, keep reading for step-by-step blogging instructions.

Why blog?
Before we get to the how, a very few words on the why of blogging. Lots of new bloggers feel a bit strange writing down their thoughts and publishing them online for anyone to see.  It might seem like a rather vain thing to do.  But there are several reasons why blogging is a useful cpd tool:

• blogging about what you've seen or done is a way of incorporating reflective practice into your professional life. We'll be talking more about reflective practice in Thing 5.
• more prosaically, blogging about events will help you remember them more clearly in the future, and that's useful for job applications and when working towards qualifications.
• you will positively impact on other people's development by blogging your ideas and experiences - professional engagement isn't just about your development, but it's also about sharing what you know with others.
• by sharing your ideas and knowledge you'll get to meet new people and develop a wider professional network.

How to blog
There are various blogging platforms available online. Some of the most commonly used are Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, and Posterous. You're welcome to use any blogging platform that you like, but we're giving instructions here for Blogger, because it's quite easy to use.

Instructions

If these instructions leave you scratching your head, then have a look at this Blogger Tour, visit the Blogger help pages, or ask questions in the comments here.

1. Go to http://www.blogger.com.
2. If you already have a Google account and you'd like your blog to be linked to that, then sign in and proceed to step three. Otherwise, click on 'Get started'.
1. Fill in the details on the 'Create an account' page.  When you've completed all the details click 'save'. You should get a confirmation email to the email address you supplied.
3. You may now be taken to the Blogger 'dashboard' page, or straight to the process of setting up a blog.  The dashboard has two main parts - your profile, and your blogs. Investigate the 'edit profile' option and note that you can change the visibility of your name, email address and any profile picture you upload. You can change these settings at any time.  You can get to the dashboard at any time by clicking the dashboard link, or the Blogger logo (an orange letter 'B').
4. If necessary, click on 'new blog'.  Fill in the required details on each page. All the options, including blog title, URL and the template design, can be changed later.
5. You should now be given the option to make your first post. Posting is pretty straightforward - note that you have the option to write your post in html, or to use the 'compose' option. 'Compose' is much more straightforward - it's like using a wordprocessor, but if you have html knowledge you might sometimes want to tinker with the html of a post.  Options for adding links, images and formatting are available across the top of the editing box.
6. When you've written a post you can preview it, save it for later, and, using the orange button, publish it online.



click to enlarge

7. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments to this post, and someone will be along to try and help out. Google is currently in the process of changing the appearance of the Blogger appearance. If what you see doesn't match the pictures shown here then please say and we'll try and help out.

What to write for Thing 1
To start off your cpd23 blogging write a post about why you're taking part in the course. You could talk about where your career is now and where you'd like it to go, what you're hoping to learn from cpd23, which of the Things you're most (or least) looking forward to, how you feel about being a new blogger or how you'd like to improve your blogging, or anything else that relates to why you're doing this!

You'll notice that in whichever blogging platform you're using, there's normally an option to 'label' or 'tag' your post. Please tag your cpd23 posts with (you've guessed it) 'cpd23', in addition to anything else you'd like to use, so that you, we and the great wide world, can keep a track of your cpd23 progress!

And finally...
If you'd like to read more on this topic you could do worse than to look at Ned Potter's 'Everything you've ever wanted to know about library blogs and blogging!' and follow the links he suggests.

This week there are two Things to do. Thing 2 will be along shortly.

Schedule for CPD23 2012

Here are the Things that we will be exploring during the 23 Things for Professional Development course this summer.  There is real a mixture of stuff: some web 2.0 and/or social media gadgets and gizmos, and some  ways of developing your career by more 'traditional', less technology-focussed, means.  Throughout the programme will be emphasising how these Things can help your professional development, although you're likely to find lots of tools useful in other ways, too! We are taking the Things at a slightly slower pace this time around, although the original posts from last year will remain in place if you prefer to go at your own pace.

The Plan

Week 1 (7th May) - Blogging

• Thing 1: Create your own blog, write about what you hope to get out of the programme. (If you already have a blog, then you're welcome to use that.)
• Thing 2: Explore other blogs and get to know some of the other cpd23-ers.

Week 2 (14th May) - Online presence

• Thing 3: Consider your personal brand

Week 3 (21st May) - Current awareness

• Thing 4: RSS feeds, Twitter, Storify

Week 4 (28th May) - Reflection week
A bit of a breather to think about what we've covered so far.

• Thing 5: Reflective practice

Week 5 (4th June) - Online Networks

• Thing 6: Online networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, LISNPN, LATNetwork, CILIP Communities)

Week 6 (11th June) - Real Life Networks

• Thing 7: National/Regional groups, Special interest groups and looking outside the library sphere

Week 7 (18th June) - Organising yourself

• Thing 8: Google Calendar
• Thing 9: Evernote

Week 8 (25th June) - Catch up week

• Guest post: CPD in your later career
  
  

Week 9 (2nd July) - Librarianship training options

• Thing 10: Graduate traineeships, Masters degrees, Chartership, Accreditation

Week 10 (9th July) - Librarianship training options continued

• Thing 11: Mentoring

Week 11 (16th July)-  Reflections

• Thing 12: Putting the social into social media 

Week 12 (23rd July) - Filesharing/Collaboration

• Thing 13: Google Docs, Wikis & Dropbox

Week 13 (30th July) - Organising your references

• Thing 14: Zotero / Mendeley / citeulike

Week 14 - (6th August) - Getting involved

• Thing 15: Attending, presenting at and organising seminars, conferences and other events

Week 15 (13th August) - Getting involved continued

• Thing 16: Advocacy, speaking up for the profession and getting published

Week 16 (20th August) - Presenting information

• Thing 17: Prezi / data visualisation / slideshare

Week 17 (27th August) - Presenting information continued

• Thing 18: Jing / screen capture / podcasts (making and following them)

Week 18 - (3rd September) - Reflection

• Thing 19: Some time to think about how you might integrate the Things so far into your workflow and routines.

Week 19 (10th September) - Catch up week

Week 20 (17th September) - Careers 

• Thing 20: Library Day in the Life and Library Routes/Roots 

Week 21 (24th September) - Promoting yourself in job applications and at interview 

• Thing 21: How to identify your strengths, how to capitalise on your interests, how to write something eyecatching that meets job specs. 

Week 22 (1st October) - Volunteering

• Thing 22: Volunteering to gain experience

Week 23 (8th October) - Final reflection 

• Thing 23: What have you learnt and where do you want to go from here?