Thing 6: Reflective Practice

I have just spent a very enjoyable Sunday morning reading through other people's blogs.  I have been truly humbled by the skills of some of my fellow bloggers, and their competence and confidence with social media.  I have also been comforted to discover that I am not the only one balking at these skills or struggling to come to grips with them.

Being self-effasive by nature, I don't feel comfortable with a prominent web presence.  I had real trouble with setting up a LinkedIn page even though I could rationalise its potential benefits to myself.  I also seem to have a fundamental difficulty in truly understanding the popularity of social media or its professional applications.  I mean, what's wrong with this:

I guess this attitude was pretty much the reason why I decided to join Rudaí 23.  So, having reached the quarter-way mark, how do I feel about social media now?  To be honest, I still feel uncomfortable, albeit less so.  The one great benefit is that I now understand what Google+, Twitter and other things are and how they work.  I feel much more confident participating in discussions about social media at work because for the first time I actually understand what people are saying!

I think what I'm still waiting to learn is how to use social media to promote my work rather than myself.  I think social media has the potential to work as a powerful tool to promote archival collections but I still haven't quite grasped how this can be done.  I am looking forward to Thing 7 as I think it may be the first step in that direction.

The one thing I must say is that this course is way more time consuming than I had allowed for.  Setting up and writing the first blog took me a day and a half and I think it took me something like three days to work on the LinkedIn page.  The long weekend has given me an opportunity to do a bit of catching up but I am genuinely concerned about my ability to keep up come September.  However, I am determined to see this course through so onwards and upwards!