Tag Archives: knowledge

Building a career path….with Lego

Posted on by acrystelle
2
Courtesy of Phillie Casablanca (CC Attribution 2.0 Generic) - http://www.flickr.com/photos/philliecasablanca/3354734116/

Courtesy of Phillie Casablanca (CC Attribution 2.0 Generic)

Okay, not quite. But using Lego as some kind of analogy will help me to explain one of the biggest challenges I’ve come across as I’ve progressed through my library and information science Masters course. I remember, back in the days of starting out, thinking I had a fairly good idea of my career path. I thought I knew the kinds of building blocks I needed to: -
1. develop my knowledge, and
2. ensure I made an informed decision and/or confirm aspirations for my career path.

Little did I know I was actually thinking of big building blocks, like Duplo. I thought I could put a few Duplo together (areas of professional knowledge) and construct the necessary knowledge and experience together to establish a career.

My career construction now seems a whole lot harder. It’s intricate. It’s like playing with Lego and working out how all the pieces will fit together to build the kind of career I see for myself. I have no doubt some, not all, LIS students and new information professionals will also feel this way at one point or another early on in their career. Here’s why.

Perhaps like me, you’ve entered the LIS course thinking you’ve got it figured out. Why else would you have chosen to do the course unless you had a fairly good idea where you’d like to end up? That’s not to say I wasn’t open to other possibilities but I’m a person who doesn’t make these kinds of decisions lightly, and so I like to have solid justification for investing my time. Maybe you thought, ‘I’m going to work in academic libraries. I want to be a Liaison Librarian’. Sure, okay.

Then this happens…..all this cool stuff comes along. The difficult thing is, there’s so much cool stuff in this profession, so many avenues, so much to learn about. More than once I have felt like I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of wonders and the possibilities are endless! Don’t get me wrong, I’m incredibly grateful for the exposure my lecturers and others in my network have provided me throughout the course. It hit me the first time, probably a couple of years ago. Oh jolly crap. Crappity-crap…..crap.

All that reading you do during the LIS course and beyond, following everything and anything that catches your eye? How on Earth can you process it all, put the pieces together, when you’re pulled in all directions and exposed to a treasure trove of knowledge?!

Suddenly Duplo isn’t what you’re playing with anymore. Bits and pieces of information have become little pieces of Lego. All those articles, blog posts, reports, etc are small increments of information, which make sense on their own, but putting it all together to develop a working knowledge of an area takes time. The LIS course can only fit in so much. To become proficient in an area of professional interest or area relevant to a career direction worthy of exploring, takes much longer than any one subject. It takes more than a simple prescription of readings and assignments. There’s no way a career, a Lego structure, can come together all at once. The structure, the career you (and I) want, will need to be broken down into smaller bits, and themselves needing constructing with smaller pieces of Lego.

I’ve come up with a few suggestions, more like ideas as I don’t know if they work, but nonetheless I’d like to share to those who may be experiencing something similar. I write these tonight as ideas for both myself and anyone else needing them. I also need to write these out to convince myself that all is, and will be, okay. I’ll try these suggestions as well. I’m not just preaching here.

1. Relax, be patient.

Patience is not my forte. I can be patient with many things, but not with acquiring knowledge. I can’t process and build my knowledge fast enough. Relax. Yes, I need to do that. Chill. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

2. Talk to people, get a mentor.

You’re not alone. I strongly suggest participating in professional development and networking events, and getting involved with your chosen professional association or event committees. Being a NewGrads coordinator has assisted with my developing a network of peers and getting in touch with experience professionals. Participating in conversation on Twitter has eased the ‘isolation factor’ and has enabled me to establish a professional voice. I signed up for a peer mentoring scheme in my first year of the course, and to this day, I still catch up with her now and then. My mentor has been fabulous for guidance and bouncing ideas around, I honestly cannot thank her enough.

3. Target your reading and exploration or define little research projects.

I have a long list of areas of interest. In my experience, it’s all become jumbled up and I’ve ended up maybe confusing myself. It’s a good thing to read widely, but I’d suggest focusing on one area of interest for about 3 – 6 months or so and see what you come up with. Create a notebook in Evernote to save items worth keeping. Review it regularly. Or perhaps you’d like to set yourself a mini research project? Determine a couple of research questions and seek out information relating to the area to help develop your knowledge. This doesn’t mean to disregard resources and articles, etc in other areas, but just focus on one or two for a bit. I’m trying to focus on research data management and innovation at the moment. Innovation is taking over as my interest gains momentum. It also happens to be an area I’d like to explore in a research project next semester, so it makes sense for me to invest some time here.

4. Reflect, take time out.

….but there’s so much to learn! I know. My goodness, don’t I know it. I’m at the base of a salad fork right now, three pathways I can see myself taking. But I cannot stress this enough – take time out to reflect. Create a career journal. Write often. My career journal has had frequent visits from me lately. I’ve gained value from exploring my interests, finding out where they might be coming from. I’ve tried to understand some motivations behind my interest in innovation, for example. Even if you don’t eventually pursue a path, exploring some underlying reasons why you were interested in an area may indicate a common thread of the type of work you’re really seeking in your career.

5. Feel the fear and do it anyway

My (awesome) manager kindly lent me a book of the same title. Basically, life is a series of learning experiences. If an opportunity comes up and you think there are some lessons to be learnt, go for it. It’s all experience. No matter what, you need to have faith that you will handle whatever that comes your way. We all have our own pathways. (I need to tell myself that quite regularly.)

Anyone else, new or experienced information professionals, wish to share their thoughts, experiences and ideas about how to build knowledge and experience towards a career we want?

Principles of Connectivism and the PLN

Posted on by acrystelle
1

Amidst attempting to work up some “headspace” momentum for writing my NLS5 paper, I thought I’d write my fortnightly post for the project….

During my literature review for the paper, I drew yet another link between the theory of Connectivism and the PLN concept. The “Principles of Connectivism” by George Siemens can be applied to the PLN context, in order to understand the purpose, characteristics and success factors of building and participating in a PLN. The eight principles (as stated in “Connectivism: a Learning theory for the Digital Age”) are: -

  • Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.
  • Learning is a process of connecting specialised nodes or information sources.
  • Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
  • Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known.
  • Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
  • Ability to see connections between fields, ideas and concepts is a core skill.
  • Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.
  • Decision making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, does not mean it will be right tomorrow, due to the constant shifting in the information climate.

For a PLN to be successful – to thrive and for its collective knowledge to evolve – there needs to be a diverse set of people connected to the network. In the LIS community, this would involve cracking the echo chamber and include people who may not work in a traditional library per se, but who work in different sectors, information environments, and also those who work in varying degrees of information professional roles such as information/enterprise architects, educators, information technology and business management. What I would recommend to those contemplating establishing a PLN, new information professionals like me, is that it’s ok to select people outside of ‘library world’ to follow, to support learning goals and interests. Diversity strengthens a network’s ability to create meaningful connections between information resources and ideas by bringing together varying opinions and understanding. The key is have an open mind.

In the current “digital age”, it is becoming increasingly important to develop the ability to know where to find information, rather than know the information itself. This is due to the ever-changing and evolving information climate, in that connections are being formed every day, every minute. I believe this is where librarians and information professionals are ahead, we are already “connectivist” minded. Librarians and information professionals’ skills, are indeed, more valuable than ever in the current information landscape. It is then inherently clear that the need to continually fine tune information skills, strengthening our “connectivist” ability, is a key driver to establish and participate in a PLN.

PLN Participation Update

# of Tweets for fortnight     94

# of Followers gained     5

# of Mentions     71

# of People I started following     10

Total # of Blogs/Feeds     54 (down 2 from last fortnight)

Top 5 Blogs/Feeds I’ve found to be good reads recently

  1. Librarian by Day
  2. iLibrarian
  3. Alexandra Samuel
  4. Annoyed Librarian
  5. David Lee King

Focusing on Network Theory #CCK11

Posted on by acrystelle
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During the last couple of weeks in the CCK11 open course, I’ve looked at Network Theory and Connective Knowledge. The readings from Week 3 about Connective Knowledge made me think about what it is I want from participating in the course. Basically, by my taking this course I aim to develop an understanding of Connectivism in a relatively structured way to feed into my current research in Personal Learning Networks – experiences and approaches to developing one for the new information professional and the value of an PLN to continued professional development. Suffice to say, focusing on applying network theory and concepts to one’s development and maintenance of a PLN seemed more relevant to my learning objectives for CCK11.

In the readings about Network Theory, I came across a number of different frameworks, all to enable analysis, description and determining effectiveness of a network.

Firstly, there are basic elements of a network – entities, connections and signals (or message). “Entities” being people, I assume individuals at this point; “Connections” being the channel or tool used; and “Signals” being the message or a piece of information if you will. From here, the network can vary with the following properties:-

  • Density – “how many other entities each entity is connected to”;
  • Speed – “how quickly a message moves (or is received) by an entity”;
  • Flow  – “how much information an entity processes – sent, received and transferred for other entities”;
  • Plasticity – ‘frequency of connections made’;
  • Degree of connectedness – “a function of density, flow and plasticity”.

Networks which are described as “effective” will exhibit the following elements or characteristics: -

  • Diversity – does the network encompass a wide variety of viewpoints?
  • Autonomy – are people contributing to the network on their own accord and not acting on an agenda of a group of organisation they work for?
  • Interactivity – is the knowledge produced by the network a product of interaction or just “a mere aggregation of perspectives”?
  • Openness – are different perspectives ‘allowed’ into the network, heard and interacted with others?

Relating these elements back to PLNs, a question would be how can we measure these elements to determine if we’re participating in an “effective network”? Can identifying an “effective network” be a strategy or approach to building and maintaining a PLN which will maximise learning opportunities? Network theory has prompted my thinking about the outcomes I’m looking for from participating in my PLN as a continual professional development activity.

Downes’ (2006) paper continues to outline “elements of network semantics”. While another relevant framework, I think there are only so many ways you can describe and interpret the climate of a network. I will need to create a visual to further understand how this other dimension can fit in a practical sense. Off to MindNode…

Now, just quickly on “connective knowledge” – Downes describes how connective knowledge occurs by stating that “a property of one entity must lead to or become a property of another entity….the knowledge that results is “connective knowledge”. For there to be connective knowledge an interaction must take place.  Makes sense, but how does a simple statement require over 30 pages of text? After the readings, I still couldn’t grasp the concept of “connective knowledge”. The readings were too wordy, beyond the depth required to explain it and filled with unnecessary jargon, in my opinion. So I came out of Week 3’s content with no real clue as to what the learning objectives actually were.

In a few weeks CCK11 will cover Personal Learning Networks, to which I’m looking forward to. This post may need to be teased apart to examine network theory and connective knowledge more closely…..

References

Downes, Stephen. 2006. Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge.
Downes, Stephen. 2005. An Introduction to Connective Knowledge.
Downes, Stephen. 2005. Learning Networks: Theory and Practice (Presentation)

This is heavy, Doc! …..Understanding Connectivism

Posted on by acrystelle
3

The past week has marked my first in the CCK11: Connectivism & Connective Knowledge course. As the post title suggests, in the words of Marty McFly in the Back to the Future trilogy, the theory is “heavy”; that was my first impression as I worked my way through the readings and listened to the Elluminate sessions.

I will admit I am somewhat confused by the theory of Connectivism. When each element was discussed in a reading, it seemed to appear in a different context in order to explain another element or supporting concept. To combat my confusion and in an attempt to make sense of Connectivism, I used the excuse to try out “MindNode” on my new Mac. Surprisingly, it worked well in creating a visual to recognise the relationships between the supporting elements. (If anyone has any tips for embedding my mind map, its saved as a PDF, please let me know. I’d be happy to share it.)

Now at this stage I should probably delve into what I think are the supporting elements/concepts for Connectivism.

Knowledge – Connectivism holds that knowledge is distributed across a “network of connections”; knowledge is a “set of connections formed by actions and experience”.

Learning – the process of “connecting”; creating connections, useful information patterns and developing the ability to “traverse networks of connections” (where knowledge the distributed)

Technology – Connectivism recognises the impact of technology on our ability and ways in which we learn. Technology is an enabler of tools we use to interact with each other and “externalise our thinking”; the information environment we find ourselves in require tools and the ability to navigate (recognise connections and patterns) the complex and rapidly evolving landscape.

Networks – created by “nodes” (people, resources) connecting to one another. The elements of successful networks, as identified by Stephen Downes are: – connectivity, diversity, autonomy and openness. These elements can certainly be related to determining the success of one’s own PLN…but more on that relationship a bit later in the course.

The above mentioned elements (or concepts) of Connectivism set the parameters of my understanding of the theory. I’m not sure if what I’ve outlined is correct, this is only my interpretation of the theory and its supporting elements, so please feel free to correct me where I’m wrong. I’m simply trying to put all these elements, in order if you will, finding their “place” in the broader theory.

Amongst the readings and listening to the sessions, I couldn’t help but wonder…..can the theory of Connectivism be not only a response (and/or an updated learning theory) to the changing information landscape and the circumstances in which we learn, but also a strategy for surviving the information overload – learning “just in time”, rather than learning for “just in case”? Do we only make the connections we need to solve problems “now” or to fill an immediate knowledge gap?

There was a question raised in the Elluminate session – How do we know what knowledge is “official”? Well, my response would be that given knowledge (according to Connectivism) is a “set of connections”, there is no “official” knowledge, only information. We have to remember there’s a difference between information and knowledge. Information is just, well, its information. Knowledge on the other hand is the “connection/s” made between the information we have sought to create it. The only “official” knowledge is the connections we make in a networked way, and also the strengths of those connections (the strength being very important in maintaining the connection).

So there’s my reflection on my first week in CCK11. If there is anything from what I’ve discussed here you wish to see me explore further or clarify, please do not hesitate to let me know. I’ll only be too happy to write a follow up blog post.

There is one question which has arisen from my wonderings. Do librarians and information professionals have a role to play in supporting connectivism? Do we, as information professionals have a role in nurturing another’s development of their ability to make connections? I say, yes we do, perhaps in educating people in the use of tools and technology, at least.