When I teach academics about managing their online profiles it's with the notion of using social media to share research and to ensure that their work is associated with them, not someone else with a similar name. For me, the need feels less imperative because concerns of authorship aren't particularly high priority. However, doing the exercises from Thing 3 has reinforced that even if you teach something regularly, you can still improve your own practices.
I'm unconcerned that, in addition to my own online presence, a search for my name delivers a clinician, a blogger and a bassist. Actually, Googling myself is a fairly uneventful experience. Most of my public content is pretty generic and work-related since I have made efforts in the last few years to adjust my privacy settings, be a little more mindful about what I post and break away from the fear of missing out that has at times had me compulsively refreshing pages in case a new post turned up in the last 60 seconds.
The biggest surprise for me was YouTube, which I didn't even consider as an online space over which I had ownership, hence why I forgot to put it on my V & R map. I consume content on YouTube frequently and have an account there, but what surprised me was that anyone could see my playlists and favourites. While there's nothing dodgy on there (apart from revealing my very random taste in music), I saved videos to playlists for myself, not for public consumption. I have gone through and changed all of that content to private now. Having checked my email accounts with haveibeenpwned, I am most concerned about my Tumblr accounts and will make sure I do my routine password change sooner rather than later.
Looking at my V & R map I can see that my online priorities are shifting from personal to professional: my map a few years ago would have been weighted much more firmly toward the upper right hand quadrant. Part of this shift relates to developing a workflow of "Personal on paper, collaborate on the cloud". But there is still a large degree of bleed-through between professional and personal. Unlike Librarian Errant, I put my name to my online identity, both personal and professional, and rely on privacy settings to ensure I am only allowing certain people into aspects of my personal life. Certainly this allows people to find my content in the professional context, but I do wonder how much I edit myself because I've put my name to things.
Ultimately I don't think there is one right solution. As the Visitors and Residents exercise demonstrates, public vs. private is relative; other people would cringe at the thought of posting things that I consider completely benign to share online. The main thing is to consider security concerns, and, as I teach my academics, that requires setting aside a little bit of time every now and then to figure out what other people find when they Google you.
1 - My legs hurt from doing squats and deadlifts at the gym this morning,
2 - I'm getting ready for my weekly cycle out to West Cambridge to be the roving librarian at the Whittle Laboratory and,
3 - It's time for another installment of 23 Research Things!
Thing 2 is about reflective blogging. Hooray! A Thing I do anyway!
Self five!
(30 Rock via https://lockerdome.com/6956494474193729/6944414779055892)
I've had personal blogs off and on since the early 2000s, back when LiveJournal was the place to over-share your feelings with strangers and obsess over which 100x100 pixel profile picture best expressed your mood. I started this blog in 2014 as I was starting think more about career development. My first post is still unpublished and is ironically titled "Social media: are we just talking to ourselves?" It was going to be a hard-hitting piece on the echo chamber effect, illustrated by quotes from Brave New World. Looking through my list, I've started and abandoned almost as many posts as I've published.
This assignment is to talk about how we feel about blogging as a tool for reflection and obviously I can see its merits. But I want to point out that it isn't always comfortable for me and I can certainly empathise with people who have serious reservations about sharing non-academic writing in such a public setting. After all, even if you are sold on the benefits of reflection in the learning process (which I am), why do those reflections need to be posted where anyone can see them? The paradoxical doubts of, "Do I really want strangers to be able to read this?" and "Probably nobody cares what I have to say anyway" can silence many potential bloggers. It's perfectly valid to write and reflect privately, and I certainly do that as well. I am a paper and pen journal writer and those notebooks will hopefully be consumed by a fire as soon as I die so that I don't have to be posthumously mortified (no pun intended) by the thought of people reading about my more navel-gazing moments.
The benefit of blogging over private journal writing is that by changing the audience to whoever it is you think might read your blog (Hi, Mom!), you are exercising a different voice. It's not the free-flowing stream of consciousness of a personal journal, nor is it the rigid structure of academic writing. You are communicating in an informal but public register, which is a crucial thing to practice as a researcher. I think of it as a format for complete thoughts, hence the unpublished blog posts sitting in my list. I was obviously thinking about a particular topic and wanted to get it written down somewhere, but I didn't have enough to say to share it. That's fine. The writing process itself is the valuable part. The public nature of this format simply holds me accountable; I feel guilty when 6 months go by with out a post, not because I think my eager readers are clamouring for it, but because I know people can see how little I've been writing and I like to challenge myself to write complete thoughts.
Reflective writing is valuable for a few reasons. First, it reinforces things you've learned. Writing about what you've recently read or attended classes in is part of the alchemical process of creating deeper understanding. Second, it allows you to clarify for yourself how you feel or think about particular topics. Third, it's just another chance to practice writing and communicating. And finally, it frees you from the burden of hanging on to whatever is on your mind.
That last one's a bit odd. Let me clarify.
You may recall from my Thing 1 post that I'm on a bit of a productivity kick at the moment. While working on some pre-planning for my first Bullet Journal last night I came across this video of David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, doing a Ted Talk on stress-free productivity.
In it, he describes how people feel that they could be more productive, if only they had more time. But too little time, he argues, is not the problem.
"You know what you’d do with two more hours? You’d have two more hours of overwhelming stickiness. Actually, for most of you, it’d be a good thing you don’t get two more hours. Because the issue is not time.
How long does it take to have a creative idea? Zero time.
How long does it take to be inspired? Zero time.
How long does it take to recognize an opportunity you could leverage and take advantage of? Zero time.
Time is not the issue for those things. There is something required for those things. What’s that? Psychic bandwidth.
You need space to think."
Creating that space to be truly present and focused, he says, requires that we get rid of all the other stuff cluttering up our thoughts by writing it down. Anything you're thinking about, from jobs you need to get done to the relationship between social media and Aldous Huxley novels, is taking up bandwidth that you need to focus on what you're doing right now. Furthermore, he says, it helps you identify the task at hand. If you're mulling over a course you just took or a conversation you just had, write about it and figure out what action you need to take. "What exactly is the work you need to do?" That is the chief value I see in reflective blogging; it's identifying the "What now?" as Georgina put it. Learning for the sake of learning is fine, but if you can figure out what you can change as a result you will get more out of it, and maybe free up some bandwidth to have some great ideas.
Hello! I'm joining in with 23 Research Things Cambridge and will do my best to post all of the "Things" in a timely manner. Thing 1 is an introduction and a chance to reflect on what we hope to get out of our involvement. I think this also might be a good chance to introduce myself in case any new readers find this blog as a result of the programme.
My name is Kirsten and I'm Assistant Research Support Librarian in an HE Engineering Department. I work with Masters and PhD students and researchers through various phases of the research process, from research ethics to accessing resources to understanding the 21st century academic publishing landscape. I do quite a bit of teaching and one-on-one work as well as developing the online support for our students and academics. While I already do a fair amount of CPD around research, I thought 23 Research Things would be a great chance to find some new ideas and be reflective about my practices.
This is rather timely as I'm looking at revamping my productivity and goal setting at the moment, moving toward an analog system that will allow me to take notes and do more reflective writing with pen and paper by trying out bullet journaling. So I'm already thinking a lot about how I manage my own information and what my personal and professional goals ought to be over the next 6-12 months. The schedule of upcoming Things looks like it will be a good blend of strategies I've thought about a lot and ones I haven't really explored personally. I'm hoping to gain a lot of perspective, both on my role in research support and as a researcher myself.
I'm also looking forward to hearing from other participants - particularly people outside the library world - in order to expand my understanding of the ways in which people do research. Look for regular updates on this blog and I hope to hear what you think as part of this programme!
Hello! It's been a while since I've written up any courses I've been on, in part because I am very lucky that I work in a place where we share what we learned on courses at our weekly staff meetings so I haven't felt the need to try to reflect or assimilate in writing. But it's always beneficial to write these things down for my own sake as well as sharing them more broadly, so I thought I'd try to make more of a habit of it, at least when I feel it would be useful to do so for my own practice. I'm working on a some other work-based and professional development habits, which I hope to talk a bit more about in an upcoming post. Meanwhile, here's a write up from a course I went on this week.
Sally Stafford's recent session on gathering evaluation and feedback was one I've been looking forward to for a while. As someone who teaches a fair amount, I often rely on the course leaders to pass on feedback from their students about what I might improve, and we are still working on developing strategies for consistently getting evaluations from the training sessions we give. While I really enjoyed this course, it was a bit of a stretch to think of ways of incorporating it into my own practice as there was a heavy bent toward feedback on exhibitions and outreach events rather than training sessions. Even so, it certainly got me thinking about creative ways of framing questions and assessing learning outcomes.
The first point Sally made was that when people think about feedback, they're often only thinking about gathering opinions after the fact. However, effective projects look for feedback throughout, from the initial development phase. By doing this you can ensure that you are delivering content that people really want, in a way they want. Teaching sessions have this built in, in that the process is inherently iterative: ideally, your training gets better each time you do it based on the feedback you've had before, and there is no "final" product to get feedback on. However, it is useful to think about impact in the same way museums do. What have people taken away from my session? What was the impact on their practice? Impact is a fiendishly difficult thing to measure, but various sectors are under increasing pressure to demonstrate measurable impact to justify funding, staff and other resources. This is not to say that everything needs to be reduced to a number, say "72% of participants said this training was Very Useful". I'm always more inspired by individual comments, like, "I learned a lot, thank you!" or "I never knew librarians knew so much about this stuff!" But in large volumes that becomes more and more difficult to parse and if you are involved in a project that requires you to justify funding, you may be dealing with people who find the numbers much more compelling than a few glowing remarks when presented in a report.
GLOs and designing questions
Central to Sally's process were the Generic Learning Outcomes, a framework used by the MLA to assess learning in non-classroom contexts. While much of the discussion around the GLOs focused on the context of exhibitions or outreach to school groups, I found the framework to be a useful prompt to think about what questions one could ask to gather feedback about different facets of learning.
Knowledge and understanding: While this is fairly straightforward, asking bluntly "How much/what did you learn?" is not necessarily going to give you brilliant feedback. Any parent who has asked their kid what they learned in school today will be familiar with the non-commital shrug followed by that slippery syllable, "Stuff". The group talked about potentially asking for one thing that stuck out, one fact for example. Since I often do follow-up sessions or series of classes, I could always ask at the beginning of a class for one thing they learned in the previous session for example.
Skills: This is a tricky one to get verbal feedback on, but could be tested through doing an activity before and then after the session. An approach that Sally used for our session was a target, where we rated our confidence with evaluation before and after the session using sticky dots placed correspondingly on the target. I think confidence is a good operative word when asking people to self-report on their skills.
Attitudes and values: Another tricky one to ask about, as Lucy was tactfully explaining, as it has to do with subjects that people are sensitive about. Sally offered the example of, "Are you a bigot?" as a potentially insensitive way of gathering feedback about this aspect. :) My content is often very value-laden. I talk pretty openly about my mistrust of metrics as a good indicator of the quality of an article, about the flaws in the peer review process and advocate passionately for Open Access publishing. Rather than gathering this in the form of feedback after the fact, I usually seek to have a discussion during the session where people are invited to share their points of view.
Enjoyment, inspiration and creativity: While I don't think I'll collect finger paintings from my students, it's worth thinking of creative ways people could respond, especially if they have felt inspired by something in a session. I refer to this facet later as the 'Ah-hah' moment and discuss it in more detail.
Activity, behaviour and progression: Once again I do often have the opportunity to find out what people learned from a previous class and I think I could take greater advantage of that to see if behaviour has changed in response to something I've taught. I usually ask if anyone has been using a particular tool or technique and ask for feedback but perhaps I could do this in a more structured way.
Creative feedback methods
I'm obviously still mulling over how to ask for feedback and how to record it, but the session was certainly not short of ideas. Many of them would suit a UX context better as they're fairly involved, e.g. focus groups, behavioural mapping, observation, interviews etc. Some suit different audiences better than others, for instance role-playing or drawing would be great for kids but I somehow doubt I could get a room full of stressed MPhils to see the value of such tasks (as much as I believe that creative endeavours are good for stress levels). There are some ideas I'm tempted to use, however. For shorter sessions on a particular tool or skill, I'd love to adapt the target method to show the change in confidence levels. For series of sessions I'd like to build feedback into subsequent sessions and help people reflect on how their practice of academic research is developing. It's definitely gotten some gears turning in my brain regarding how I could gather feedback beyond my usual post-its at the end asking for one thing they've learned and one thing they'd improve.
Ethics and accessibility
I wanted to raise a couple of issues that didn't come up during the course. First, gathering data from people I think it's essential to speak to someone in your institution that knows about research ethics. They may say that no further approval is needed, but the moment you start gathering artifacts or quotes from people, start observing their behaviour or start intruding on their time it's important to think about the ethical considerations.
Is participation voluntary?
Have you informed people that they're being watched?
Have you informed them of how you will use their data and do you have a plan to follow through with that?
Who will have access to the feedback they give you?
Unless told otherwise, people have a reasonable expectation of anonymity when taking part in studies. It doesn't have to be a signed consent form in every instance and can be very light-touch. For example, I plan on adding a quick verbal disclaimer when I'm asking for feedback that it's anonymous and any feedback they give us will be used to make our training programs better. There is a blurry line between user experience research and feedback and I would think that it would be good to err on the side of caution and consult with someone who can give guidance on what you need to tell participants and how to keep the data in a safe and anonymous way.
Similarly, it's important to think about comfort levels. One method discussed for use with teaching sessions was task-based feedback, for example acting exercises to gather feedback during a session. It was mentioned that adults were likely to be self-conscious about this, but that it would be engaging for children. I agree but I think it's important to be aware that if this is built into the curriculum of a particular course or training session it may not be accessible for people on the autistic spectrum or other social differences. By way of making course content equally accessible to all, I would be interested in finding a way for students to opt in rather than making it a requirement, or seek other ways in which you could gather similar feedback.
Accessibility sprung to mind again when we looked at feedback methods using red, green and amber coloured pieces of card to let the instructor know how confident or engaged participants felt. Again, alternatives that are accessible to colourblind participants would be useful to prepare ahead of time. These are just a few examples - there are many ways to build accessibility into your feedback process if you take the time to consider who is being excluded by the method you have chosen.
Ah-hah moment
I think my favourite concept from the course (and my own 'Ah-hah' moment) was the idea of focusing feedback on what inspired someone, one idea they'll take away from the session or one lightbulb that lit up during the session. Even if a student in one of my sessions paid me pretty much no attention but they had an 'Ah-hah' moment regarding their own work while sitting there, I feel like at least I provided them the space to get that inspiration and I'd love to know about it.
For kids visiting an exhibition, they may not grasp your thesis but they will certainly remember the taxidermy pigeons because they're surprising. Or they might remember that, like Charles Darwin, they always keep a journal too and like drawing the animals they see. Similarly, my students may not remember everything I tell them about Data Management, but I hope they remember the story about the guy who lost 6 months of work when his laptop containing his PhD and the backup disk, both in his rucksack, were stolen in a pub. Or when looking at conference posters for design tips, maybe a student will finally figure out what methodology she'll use for her own dissertation (this literally happened in my class yesterday). I don't really mind if she took on board less of what I taught as long as she left my class excited about something to do with her work.
I think beyond tips for improving the actual content or timing of the sessions this will be the focus of generating feedback. It provides students the chance to reflect on what they're excited about, which will reinforce whatever inspiration they've had, and it gives me a window into what material students are resonating with. On a personal development level, I've just started a weekly reflection/accountability thing where I write about what went well vs. not so well, which includes noting down my own 'Ah-hah' moments. It's really helpful to try to capture what's inspiring you from the courses you're taking or the books you're reading as it makes it easier to remember and therefore implement any changes that you might think of as a result (especially if, like me, you're consuming so many great articles and podcasts that often times great ideas are driven out and forgotten, no matter how inspiring they were).
So, to try to synthesise a write up in which I concluded pretty much nothing, it was a good session and it's definitely got me thinking. These concepts might go on the back-burner for a bit but I can have a look at this post later on when I'm developing courses to see if it prompts any more 'Ah-hah' moments.
Raise your hand if any of the following things are true of you:
I have regularly worked longer hours than I am contractually required to and/or skipped at least one entire break in a working day.
I have intentionally gone to work ill or felt incredibly guilty about calling in sick.
I frequently feel worried that my work isn't good enough and that at some point I will be "found out".
The more I am praised or recognised for my work, the more pressure I put on myself to live up to my own impossible expectations.
I'm going to have to put my hand down now because it's hard to type. (Which is to say, me too.) I would be embarrassed admitting something so personal but I think it's true of so many people I know in life in general and in libraries specifically. It's something I've been consciously working on for the last year or so but like all progress, it's seldom straightforward.
I won't go into the specifics of why I'm writing about this now, suffice it to say that my co-workers are fantastic and helped me realise pretty quickly that I was working WAY too hard for a couple of weeks and not taking care of myself. Part of it was time pressure and part of it was genuinely enjoying what I was doing enough to not want to switch off at 5:00, but underneath that there was lurking the ever-present sense that I needed to earn my value through productivity.
Important things to remember, by the incomparably lovely Stevie Wilson.
That is not and has never been true. In the comic above I feel like the artist is dealing with a sense of dissatisfaction with her "day job" as a barista, but the same feeling can be present if you love your job. Indeed, I think it's even harder to separate your sense of value from what you do all day when you're passionate about what you do. Being a research support librarian is my dream job and I love it, but that doesn't mean there isn't more to me. And that other stuff is worth cultivating and caring for. You, yourself, alone, doing nothing, accomplishing nothing, have value.
This week a very lovely and helpful person sent me this article, which I of course related to massively and which reminded me about all the work I've been trying to do on keeping everything in balance:
This is just a library. It’s not heart surgery. This work will all be here when we get to it.
So, take a minute and assess your workload and your projects. Are any of them emergencies? Ask your boss for a meeting and ask for help prioritizing the work if you need to. Whatever you do, Shiny New Librarians, do not try and be the hero and overdo it because we need you. We need you to do all of the cool great things you’re doing now, but we also need you to make it into management without being burned out and angry. We need you to run the next generation of libraries and protect the new people from themselves.
It's reminded me to be more mindful, to be able to put things aside and know that it will be okay. Nothing's going to catch fire if I don't finish that report RIGHT NOW. It's reminded me that I am sometimes so worried and stressed about living up to expectations that I make it harder for myself to do good and meaningful work. So, I've streamlined things a bit, worked on my task management, tried to reign in a bit of my multi-tasking so that I'm really focused on what I'm doing at any given moment and tried to be more disciplined about actually going home at a reasonable hour. My graph is still more of a squiggly line than a nice straight line, but as long as the squiggles are trending in the right direction I think I'll call it a win!
I hope that if you put your hand up at the beginning of this post you'll think about what's behind that and remember that you, too, have value as yourself.
Apologies that my blogging has been a little like the sporadic surfacing of a Cuvier's Beaked Whale lately! I have a lot I want to reflect on and, as I've said previously, the times when I feel least like I have time to reflect are precisely the most important times for me to do it. (I wonder why I use breathing metaphors so much when thinking about reflecting...) So I'm sticking my head above water to give a quick update to reflect a bit on what has been going on since I started my new job in November.
Attended a course on game design for libraries put on by the CILIP School Libraries Group. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was being taught by some HE librarians and they were talking about the HE sector for the most part, so the content was very well suited to me, but it was also fantastic meeting and talking to lots of librarians from school libraries. We don't often get to meet school librarians in HE but I was struck by how different the support for information literacy is in the different schools. It reinforced the idea that we can't assume what undergraduates arrive knowing because just within London there is very different exposure to critical reading and information literacy depending on the school.
Attended various talks by the fabulous Office of Scholarly Communications. These guys just seem to get it. They just formed last year and already they're tackling a lot of big issues facing researchers such as open access, open data, and managing one's online profile. This overlaps with some of the work librarians are doing but rather than fighting for supremacy, the OSC have made sure to leverage the might of librarians in Cambridge, providing training and ensuring that we have a lot of buy-in with what they're doing. I think it's absolutely brilliant - rather than having to navigate the vast and confusing information "out there" online, we have a local resource I can point people to and in turn they're making sure librarians are better prepared to answer some of the questions we get from academics. Big shout out to these guys! Check out their blog as well - it's well worth a look.
Attended the Libraries@Cambridge conference. I was also one of the live bloggers for this event. You can read my hastily typed post on the first Keynote Address here! It was my first time at this event and I was very impressed. I like going to external events like the CILIP SLG course because of the chance to meet with people from diverse backgrounds but it was clear from the conference that there is huge diversity within library roles just in Cambridge.
I've been learning quite a lot in my new role, helped along by my brilliant co-workers. From my perspective it's a relatively small team, but there's a lot of interlocking expertise. Some of us overlap in places but we also complement each other's expertise very well.
The big thing on my mind at the moment, however, is teaching. For a very, very long time I've known that I wanted be involved in education in some way, just not in front of a classroom day in and day out. (I have respect bordering on awe for those who can summon the energy to do so and do it well!) This meandered from thinking about tutoring for a non-profit to interpreting heritage sites for visitors to doing museum outreach and education and lately being focused on information literacy education through libraries. I've taught roller skating with the local roller derby league and absolutely loved it - the feeling of helping someone "get it", of breaking things down to help them, giving pointers and knowing when to step back and let them practice on their own.
So I was fairly nervous but also excited when I found out I was to begin teaching last week! I've taught a couple of sessions so far and I think they went pretty well. Areas I want to work on are deepening my knowledge of the areas I'm talking about so I can speak with a bit more understanding and developing a storehouse of pertinent examples for each point. What I think I'm good at: being engaging/holding people's attention, appearing relaxed even when I'm feeling nervous or flustered and developing sessions that take into account different learning styles. I think it's a little early to start making much deeper statements about teaching. I can certainly see how it is an incredibly dynamic process learning to teach!
There is a lot more going on at the moment that I would love to get into, such as the UX study for which I'm currently applying for ethics approval, and my new-found evangelism for Open Access, especially at moments when I'm dealing with tricky Inter Library Loans requests, but I will save those for another time!
Well, nearly a year of increasing momentum has culminated in a month of HUGE change for me. So seeing as I'm gradually adjusting to the breathless pace of my life at the moment it's probably time to - er - stop and take a breath, right? I still believe that one of the most important times to slow down and reflect is when you feel like you don't have the time to do so. So here I go, putting my reflective hat on...
Err, not exactly what I had in mind. Source: Martin Thomas on Flickr.
Well, the headline, really, is that in November I left my job of 4 years at Trinity College Library to start a job at the Department of Engineering Library (probably abbreviated to CUED library from now until forever) as the Assistant Research Support Librarian. I've been asked how it's going a lot and it's hard to come up with anything more insightful at the moment than "WOW is it different!" That seems to encapsulate the majority of my impressions so far. Granted, many of them are more nuanced than that but I'm pretty sure the people asking me aren't asking for a point-by-point run down of the job description. But to provide a general summary, it's a role for a qualified librarian, so a big step up in that respect. Then add to the general differences between College and Departmental libraries a big difference in size of team, in culture and so on, it's quite a change. Fortunately it's a change that suits my personality and interests very well!
Part of my inability to form many impressions, however, is that the library is actually currently being refurbished. We are supposedly getting it back this week, but the fact remains that at least the first month of my job has been in a hugely transitional phase for the entire organisation. On the plus side, not being in the library has meant the library has been embedded in the department in a very interesting way. We're currently in the new Dyson Centre for Engineering Design, complete with students walking through with robotic vehicles they're building, and a suite of 3D printers!
Have you seen the Dyson Centre's new 3D printers yet? They're right next to the temporary library, so come say hi! pic.twitter.com/VyX7lt8HGe
My job is primarily to support the researchers, PhDs and academics, but has also involved taking on Inter Library Loans, design work, some aspects of the online publishing of the research output of the department, getting involved with more Future Lib projects and getting to grips with our unfortunately patchy access to the British Standards. Another aspect has been lots of professional development. It means I've been rushing around to various courses, conferences and meetings which it would take too long to summarise. I hope to be able to use this blog more often to reflect on some of the things I'm working on and write up courses I go on, but we'll see what time allows.
So, goodbye Trinity! It has been a great place to work and I contributed to some projects I'm really proud of there (indeed, my final Labours of the Month blog post just went up today!), but I am also very thrilled to be taking on new challenges in an area that I have always had an interest in with CUED's brilliant team!
Goodbye, Yellow Brick Wren... Hello CUED Library! Source: David Gruar.
