Thing 18 – Reflective Practice ( on Things 14-17)
So Thing 14 was a task I readily dipped into, as I am a
lover of lists – particularly the act of ticking items off. Nothing beats that satisfaction! However, I
have a habit of making my lists AFTER half the tasks have already been
completed, which defeats the purpose
entirely and doesn’t improve the timeliness of completion – I think my travels
on this Rudai 23 journey are a case in point!
So I enjoyed trying out Evernote – and road tested it with
some projects that typically arise in my current job, like following the Budget
to Finance Bill process from start to finish. As you can imagine this process
has many strands, and we have different tasks to complete at each stage and
different sets of information we need to keep track of. For that reason I particularly liked the
enhanced features that make this more than a “list”. Being able to attach files
and clip webpages meant that I was able to keep everything I needed together in
one space, and decreased my chances of overlooking any tasks etc. Also, really
handy as a reminder tool, as when you need to repeat the project you can go
back and reproduce the same list of tasks and tweak them to the current
year/project as required. It’s definitely a tool I will use again, so thanks
Rudai 23 for introducing me to it properly!
I also tried out Feedly as I monitor a lot of websites and
do use RSS feeds – a lot of the sites I follow are slightly messy to begin with
so I think I may need to tweak this a bit better in order to get it working
efficiently for me – it’s a tool that I think requires a bit of trial and
error. I also tried out Remember the Milk, but having used the enhanced
functionalities of Evernote, I just preferred Evernote, and would probably
stick with it.
For Thing 15 we needed to consider how to evaluate
information and Wikipedia was discussed as an example. I am a huge fan of
Wikipedia, particularly when researching something you are absolutely clueless
about. However, I am also aware that being clueless leaves you open to getting
“ bad information”. That is why I generally use Wikipedia as a starting point –
something that gives me a synopsis but also points me to citations/sources and
back up material etc, that can be used for the “real” research. Of course
that’s much easier when the Wikipedia passage is well referenced and the
citations are complete so I tried out the Citation Hunt Tool. It really showed
me how difficult it actually can be to validate everything that you might read
in a Wikipedia article (or online in general!) so it was informative to get to
grips with the process and to try and understand exactly what kind of
validation is required in order to be 100% confident of accuracy. I can’t say
that I caught the Wikipedia editing bug (!) a lot of hard work! But the
exercise has definitely made me appreciate the resource all the more!
My digital footprint is something that I have always been
conscious of, but part of engaging with more apps and online tools means
expanding that footprint so I make it a policy to limit myself to only those
that I really need and also to take the time to analyse and set the privacy
settings according to my needs. No more information that is required in order
to use the tool to its utmost or to my exact needs. It is a good to take the
time to review these every so often though, as privacy policies are ever
changing and you might find that the app you depended on 3 years ago, is little
used and defunct now. I actually think it would be worthwhile setting a review reminder every six months or so, just
to make sure that you are controlling your Digital footprint effectively.
When it comes to Sharing work I’m afraid I have to admit to
being the beneficiary moreso than the sharer! I use Slideshare regularly,
particularly for downloading webcasts and their slides. Perhaps time to think
about giving a little back!
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