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!

#Thing13 Reflective Post

 

As a reluctant and intermittent user of social media platforms over the years, doing the Rudai 23 course has given me an opportunity to revisit and rethink how I might benefit from more interaction with said platforms. I am in the position where my current job does not require a strong public social media presence, and in fact, it can often be discouraged in a way as I work for a large corporate with very firm ideas about its branding and image, and where social media presence is strongly monitored by a marketing team. Therefore, my “personal brand” has to be mindful of situation, which is why I created a Twitter bio that does not name my place of work and makes sure to mention that all views are personal ones. In a way it is limiting as a professional and I am curious how others negotiate their private and professional selves when creating an online personal brand?

However, this does not mean that social media and online networking and collaboration has no place in my day to day affairs. It is undoubtedly one of the most current and easily accessed sources of up-do-date information, I monitor a lot of websites, government departments etc for their latest updates and press releases and quite often these can be found on Twitter or Facebook feeds before they hit the various organisations’ websites. For this reason, I found the exercise in following various users on Twitter quite interesting and it is something I will try to hone and fine tune in the coming months so that I have a feed that will point me towards developments that I need to know about in a timely fashion.

Networking is something that I find challenging, and I am of the mindset that maybe Twitter or LinkedIn are things that I should be using more in order to reach out to other institutions and potential collaborators in a simple and informal way. This part of the course has not changed my mind on the value of Facebook as a professional tool for one’s personal brand – certainly useful for your overall Organisation to have a Facebook Page, and to use it to highlight Events etc and also just to maintain visibility in front of potential and current users. But for the individual, I still think that it’s function is largely personal over professional.

I have already covered the collaborative tools in my previous blog post so will not repeat it all here, but I definitely find them a positive and hope they continue to develop and improve.

Overall, I am still just “dipping my toes” and feeling my way around how I want to present myself to the online world and how I can best use others’ online presences to my benefit. It is definitely an ongoing process I think and not something that should be done in haste – it is something that should be carefully crafted to your individual requirements.

Thing 12 – Collaborative Tools

#thing12

The last collaborative project that I worked on was a report we were commissioned to write for an external organisation. Some of the work was face to face, as it was the responsibility of my department to produce the final report, but also some of it was virtually as other contributors came from other departments, some of which were in physically different offices.   It was a rather large and complex report, but as a large company we use iManage, which means files are saved in locations that everyone can access, there is version control on documents as well as the ability so see previously saved versions, there is access control based on user permissions, and along with the usual track lining facilities in Microsoft Word, it made the process a lot easier to manage.

However, there is  still a lot of “manual” control over a project this large – the report was broken down into chapters,  diagrams and graphs were doled out to marketing teams to create, and dropped in at the end, the bibliography and footnotes had to be carefully cultivated from all the disparate parts. In hindsight, and now having done the Rudai 23 online networking portion of the course, I think perhaps something like Trello might have kept a better handle on some elements of the process – and helped with the last minute checks that everything was in and in order before we reached the deadline!

On a more personal level I have used Google Docs for planning my sister’s hen weekend – a more formidable task that you might at first expect – but it was an excellent way of keeping tabs on all participants and which parts of the weekend they were included in, who needed accommodation etc.

Overall I would say that using a collaborative tool is most definitely a positive, especially if you might have any “rogue elements” in your team – e.g. the person who is just not good at communicating what needs to be done, what has been changed etc.  Or the person who is not good at consistently saving and backing up their work.  Or just for the simple task of not losing sight of a “Master Document”!

#thing10 #thing11 #Rudai23

Check out my twitter account and personal branding bio @LindaGorIre

#Thing9 - Reflecting on online exhibitions and infographics.......



The first thing I would have to say about creating an online exhibition is that, as I am finding with a lot of these visual communicator "things", is that it is time consuming. If you want your exhibition to look well and make sense, you need to put in the time. Forward planning is essential!

Going at it in a haphazard manner is not the way (as I've learned!), and in future I would definitely map out how I want it to look and feel, and what information I want where, before going at it. Otherwise you spend a lot of time re-doing the same stuff and for a project like this, when there can be so many parts, right down to the smallest image or the curating of a piece of text or whatever, that is not something you want to be doing.

For my "exhibition" I decided to use Wordpress, as I have been using Blogger for this blog, and wanted to try out a different platform. I took the "Budget Summary" leaflet from this year's budget and turned the information into an online exhibition of the main points. Be careful when you are picking the web address of your exhibition! I realised I had put the wrong year in mine at the end..not helpful when it comes to search results.
In general though I found the Wordpress platform quite straightforward to use once I got the hang of it.

I enjoyed playing around with the Infographics - Piktochart is very easy to use. I was using the free version but I would imagine it is a powerful tool if you have the paid version and all the options. Easy to whip up one of these for anything that you might want to draw people's attention to, or explain in an easy way - and very handy for throwing up on social media platforms like facebook, twitter etc. A great way I think of keeping the content on those pages looking fresh and up to date.

Overall, the whole "Visual Communicator" module was an eye opener for me - I discovered a lot of tools that I didn't know existed, and which I feel could all be easily mastered to good effect over time. I look forward to that process!

#Thing8 - trying out infographics with piktochart!

#Thing7 - Take a look at my online exhibition here:

https://budget2017thing7expo.wordpress.com/

I took the Budget 2018 summary leaflet from the Department of Finance and turned it into an exhibit of the most important details from the budget.