Reflections part 2

Flickr is definitely my favourite thing so far. I love the possibilities that arise from the interaction between word and text. And despite my doubting attitude to tagging, I have to say that I've been proved (a bit) wrong:

In my previous post I started to write some reflective material about Cam23 so far. I searched Flickr for keywords "reflection woman mirror", expecting to find pictures of a woman looking in a mirror. But then I fell in love with this photo of a woman and her reflection. And here's the thing: Library of Congress had allocated subject headings

Airplane industry
Women--Employment
World War, 1939-1945
Bombers
Drilling
United States--Tennessee--Nashville

but all the things I'd searched under were listed not in the LC headings but in the tags on the right hand side. Someone had the imagination to see that it was a picture of a woman's reflection in a mirror and tag it accordingly.

Mirror, mirror ...

(Woman operating a hand drill, 1943. Photo courtesy Library of Congress)

In my first post I mentioned the blog Random acts of reality

Recent posts about training and learning on that blog have been outstanding. Reynolds writes forcefully about the need to move new technology skills from the "nice to know" category to the "need to know". He writes about the need to develop yourself: "the only development you can be sure of getting".
Having followed 23 things so far I know he's right.

Looking back, it's been hard work. Re-visiting my own blog posts, I can spot the things that I reviewed when I was tired and grumpy (Delicious in particular, written up late Friday night and early Saturday morning). But if you're not careful, this becomes a reason to do nothing, forever postponing activity until one's feeling fresher/ had more coffee etc.

I've learned a lot of new things as well as the web skills. Apparently, according to the VARK questionnaire, I'm a "follow the written instruction" type of person. But while doing 23 things, I've been amazed by how much I can learn by simply asking other people. This hasn't been part of my learning strategy in the past, but it will be in future. For example, reading about other people's learning experience in their blogs has been the thing that has kept me in this programme so far. I have loved reading about how people have approached learning a whole lot of new things. I never realised I was surrounded by so many creative and talented and downright determined people.

So, the future: I know now that there's a bigger pool of expertise than I ever realised, right on my doorstep in the UL. Future resolution is to use it. I hope this will feed into work and help me get a lot more done.