New Skills: New Plan

After a brilliant two days with Sangeet, at the Cymal sponsored 'WiseKids' workshops, I am full of ideas!

I work as a part-time Information Librarian, at the University of Glamorgan (Glyntaff Campus) LRC. My role is to support 'Care Sciences' students and lecturers (nursing courses etc.) navigate their way around our range of resources and get the most from them to achieve great results.

I arrange and conduct student inductions, run workshops, source and buy books (increasingly e-books) answer numerous queries, man the Information and Service Desk (ISD), manage a budget, attend faculty meetings etc. -  all on 18.5hrs p.w.! I job-share with my colleague Robert and one of my ideas, following on from Sangeet's course, is to develop a really interesting collaborative Blog, with weekly contributions from myself and Robert (and possibly other LRC staff ). This will be an extra and fun way of supporting students and staff - because it will be interactive and dynamic and definitely not boring. A real human connection, rather than cold functional advice. It will, of course, be full of useful information literacy tools, pointers to really great resources, reminders about current service developments and so on - but it will, hopefully, be so much more . . . . 

Once up and running, I will create a link to my Uni Glam e-mail signature, so that every e-mail I send out will have the link. I also plan to advertise my work in our Newsletter etc., as things develop. I have already discussed the idea with my colleague Rob and he's definitely up for it. With two of us contributing, the task won't be onerous and should be full of excellent content. 

I will be using 'TweetDeck' to help me populate the blog with interesting and up-to-date developments. I do already use Twitter - but the WiseKids course has taught me all kinds of ways to exploit this Web 2.0 tool in more effective ways. 

I could say a lot more here, but, for now, I'm simply going to quote the Nike mantra and 'Just Do It'. Wish me luck and I'll catch up with you guys again in November and hopefully, have something worthwhile to show. . . .