An excellent outing last night to the British Library for the latest talk accompanying the Out of this world exhibition. A nice illustration of the benefits of CPD – I was looking around the BL site for upcoming events for the CILIP in London Google Calendar of interesting stuff in London (fancy contributing? get in touch) just when they were adding the events listing. The result was myself and a mate were in a packed crowd for Alan Moore in conversation with Stewart Lee. I suspect tickets would not have come my way if I had heard about it through slower channels.
It was a fascinating discussion ranging across scifi, science, religion, technology, genre, labels and who can remember what else.
There were demonstrations of IP red in tooth and claw – for example why some comic books are movies and others are not. And how clashes over IP have impacted on the quality of writing in comics. Alan Moore apparently gets no money from the sale of V for Vendetta Merchandise – but does get an enormous sense of personal well being from seeing them at demonstrations around the world (DC less so – apparently we won’t be getting any more V movies as a result).
Moore takes an interesting position on technology being extremely interested and reading widely about it but largely refusing to adopt it. He no longer has a television since they dropped the analog signal in Northampton, refuses to have a mobile and has no email address.
There was a fab quote from Stewart Lee “what is twitter if not voluntary surveillance” that gave me a wry chuckle thinking of all the people who might be signing up for CPD23 over this week. I originally joined Twitter as part of my involvement in the CILIP Defining our Professional Future exercise so I must be slightly past my one year of involvement. I do find it useful (as well as entertaining) but access at work is limited which prevents me integrating it into the flow of my day in the way I might like. I recently signed up for TweetyMail that has helped with some of the link sharing issues caused by using Twitter predominantly via Snaptu.
RSS is not a new thing for me. I had a long love affair with Bloglines that I used for a good six years and I have commented already about my current RSS consumption.
I was surprised to find that I was able to get Pushnote installed on my work computer. I say installed as I am struggling to decide if it is working or not. I follow a fair few people on Twitter but there is little sign of them being involved in this and I cannot really see the point. I do not seem to be alone in this based on peoples tweets. Maybe a use will become apparent.
You can find some other Alan Moore & Stewart Lee footage on the web. At the time of writing there a still tickets available for R.U.R. on the 6th of July – it has been a brilliant series of events.
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Sign in nowSurprisingly I only have 80 subscriptions though I am adding more for CPD23. 78 of those are personal interest and nothing to do with work (I’ve added 2 CPD23 ones already) — knitting, photography, general interest (e.g. kottke), science-related. I used to have a large number of work-related feeds too for public health for current awareness purposes, but having recently changed jobs I purged those and haven’t quite found my feet yet to figure out what would be useful to follow.
I follow similar sentiments of Cory Doctorow though if you are already on the fringes of something you may not hear about it. Often I mark whole feeds as read because they are prolific (e.g. Scientific American) and I just don’t have time. I think doing this tells you where your interests are because you feed those first. Sometimes when I’m away and disconnected (I have a smart phone that isn’t really very good at keeping in touch), I return and feel a bit overwhelmed about everything I’ve missed, but then I say “Well there was that whole year where I hardly glanced at a blog and I survived” and then happily mark all as read. It is very easy to get bogged down with keeping abreast of everything on blogs, Twitter, and the professional literature. I think there is still a long way to go in finding that balance.
I don’t think this has come across as coherent as I had hoped. I’ll maybe give it more thought and pick it up on my own blog.
RSS overload is a big problem for me, the problem is when you mark as read you forget which blogs you just always skip over, those need weeding really.
I know Google Reader tracks the things you have read (what doesn’t google track?) but I am not sure if it differentiates between actually read and just clicked bulk read. Must have a look.
I think the professional is personal too and I find it difficult to write in a strictly ‘professional’ style – I always veer into the personal – can’t help it. . . .
Despite the universal loathing for email and the wonderful world that RSS was supposed to deliver, I can’t help but feel that RSS has simply failed to live up to its promise. It’s just too easy to ignore. Emails sit in my inbox, staring me down every day until I do something with them. RSS feeds on the other hand can be wiped clean without a shred of remorse. Despite subscribing to numerous work-related feeds over the years, I only have two that get read more than 50% of the time. This one and Bad Science. Perhaps cpd23 will help me find something else that sticks.
Thanks Ben – pleased to be offering something generally worth reading.
I am finding it hard to know where to turn in the torrent of potential reading – I have enjoyed more than a few things I have read but I wonder if future posts without the CPD23 motivation would necessarily remain a priority? Hopefully some good new stuff will bubble up as you say.
Interesting post. I think you’re right that having the group blog is a little confusing (IMO partly because the title of it implies a single author). Maybe if the blog had a little avatar next to each post representing the author, that might make it clearer?
Also agree that keeping personal and professional totally separate is near-impossible.
I have a near-unique forename/surname combo; feel it might be a blessing for branding but a curse for any semblence of privacy/anonymity…
Good point on the avatar thing – I suspect a previous blog template did include this information but at the cost of the post titles showing. No doubt we will change it again in the future.
The title reflects the fact that I think this blog started as one person affair and slowly borged into the present arrangement.
I note from your blog that you are a London based CPD23er – I hope you will take advantage of the event in week 5 (advertised elsewhere on this blog!)
[...] is not a new thing for me. I had a long love affair with Bloglines that I used for a good six years and I have commented already about my current RSS [...]
[...] thing for me. I had a long love affair with Bloglines that I used for a good six years and I have commented already about my current RSS [...]
I haven’t heard of Pushnote but it must have had some decent hype to have you fight to get it working. I’ve been using StumbleUpon sporadically over the last couple of years but I suppose this is more for transferable bookmarks & tags than assigning a rating to things.
I use something called Yoono that embeds in Firefox for Twitter access. It recently had access issues possibly because I use it across home and work but these seemed to resolve when I upgraded. It seems quite good and I’ve tried some of the ‘flash in the pan’ ones.
You have to fight to get rid of it too!
Your post made me smile. I am one of those who have worked in medical education and know the term ‘reflective practice’ and find that it’s almost easier to do it than to explain it!
I’m interested in your hope that CILIP will introduce mandatory CPD; with my Devil’s Advocate hat on for a minute, would you be concerned that in an attempt to ‘professionalise the profession’, it would discourage people from Chartership/CPD altogether?
For me the need is to make Chartership enduringly meaningful both to those in the profession and our employers. Chartership at present is a useful process but a one shot deal. I know you can revalidate but without the push will people do it? Signs point to only a limited level of uptake.
People are doing the CPD anyway – stacks of it. The mandatory element would be the tracking. As a pay off for the small effort of online tracking (beyond the personal value of actually doing the reflection) there should be a public online site that I could point to that would allow employers to verify that I was maintaining my Chartered status. As a recruiter I would value this.
Hi,
I get much more out of the CILIP discussions on LinkedIn than I ever did with CILIP Communities. People just seem to use it more often so it becomes much more dynamic. It’s quite nice to be able to check someone’s profile when they have commented on something too – just to check that they may know what they are talking about! Sarah
RT@ LibrarianGMIT: New useful search engine that returns full PDF scientific articles not subject to access fees: http://www.freefullpdf.com
*Headdesk*
*eye roll*