I am behind with my assignments! Part of the reason is that I have been away - in Croatia, which was beautiful and amazing and I would 100% recommend a visit - but also because the next "thing" is recording myself. And I've never been happy with that ... I'm usually found on the other side of the camera and don't really like the way I sound. Although I suspect many people feel the same because when we "hear" ourselves talking in a recording, it's never the same as when we hear ourselves in real life.
So I have been putting this off a bit.
And then I read the post properly and it said that if creating podcasts wasn't particularly relevant to your job then listen to some and make some comments. Hurrah!
My school library is very "traditional". I have lots of books, magazines and journals, a few PCs, a projector and screen but not much else in the way of technology. We were a Maths and Computing Specialist School so have a lot of IT suites around the place, each department has a laptop trolley and there are various iPads, etc. for people to use. But this doesn't seem to have permeated into the library. I tried some Kindles a while back but, other than an initial flurry of interest, nobody is bothered about them and even those students with their own Kindles have gone back to physical books. I'm quite happy with this, I will move in whatever direction the school wants to go and update my skills accordingly but it does mean that the use of the latest technology in the library is an area where I'm lacking in knowledge and experience .... hence one of the reasons I signed up to do this MOOC. That said, it's all very well learning how to do something but if you don't use it then that knowledge is going to get forgotten or become out-of-date. And I don't see the point in learning lots of new stuff in intricate detail that I'm never going to use.
Back to podcasts. I can't see me using them in the near future. Certainly not at work ... if I'm going to be talking to the students then it's going to be in person. And I can't see me creating lots of podcasts to share, I much prefer using written words - I have my other blog "Library Stuff" and I write articles for various publications. I have recorded a couple of talks for MOOCs before and I've also had to give talks for CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) that were live-streamed ... I have to say that I was extremely nervous about these!
So ... Thing 7 .... I have listened to some of the podcasts listed and have subscribed to "Circulating Ideas" as I think it could be interesting and useful. And I'm feeling quite relieved that I don't have to create one myself .
Thanks for the post, Barbara! Doing a podcast has definitely been a bit of a sticking point with people, with most opting to do as you have (as far as I have seen), check out some podcasts and comment on them. I'm stuck at this Thing myself because I really do want to record something, and I just haven't had time -- I just want to see if I can talk about a library-related topic in a concise and coherent way that someone might actually listen to.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, that's neither here nor there, thanks again for your thoughts on this topic! #rudai23
I think a lot of people don't like venturing into the film/recoding world ... writing words is very different! At the very least, you are able to think about what you want to say and edit it. Time is also an issue and I was going to do a podcast ... but asked my partner if he would be my "interviewer" and even he baulked at this! At which point I decided that they, at the moment, weren't going to be a big part of my world. In fact, being a visual learner myself, I can totally understand people's preference to see and hear rather than just hear!
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