sallysetsforth

Gosh, three weeks have now passed since I delivered my presentation on "Twitter for professional development and career progression" at the ALIA Top End Symposium. I didn't mean to wait so long before posting about it, but life has been so busy!

My presentation time was 10 minutes, so I didn't have time to discuss all (or even most) of the findings from my survey. So I selected some of the key results and findings that I hoped would resonate with my audience, along with a few of the fabulous comments that the respondents contributed.

I've uploaded the presentation to SlideShare. You can either view it from this blog post, or click HERE to see it on the SlideShare site. My speaker notes are included at SlideShare.


My presentation received great feedback from the symposium attendees. I had some really good questions from the audience, and lots of people chatted to me during the breaks. There were also quite a few Territory librarians who were inspired to reinvigorate their languishing Twitter accounts and give it another try - and it was great to meet them during the symposium :)

To top it all off, at the end of the symposium I was selected for the best presentation award! It was a real surprise and honour, and I'm very grateful to the Northern Territory Library, who sponsored the award.

P.S. In my last post, I mentioned that I had heaps of blog posts on the way. And I do. In fact, many of them are already written (well, scribbled on pieces of paper at least). The problem has been finding the time, and sometimes the energy, to complete and publish them. My next post should go some way towards explaining my recent busy-ness and lack of bloggy-ness ...

The ALIA Top End Symposium was on last weekend, and the following day I headed off to Alice Springs where I spent a week working at the campus library there. So I have heaps that I want to blog about, but I'm going to start with an unsual experience I had in Alice this week.

My colleague Leonie took me on a tour of the uni campus - she was a great guide and introduced me to lecturers and staff all over campus. One of the highlights of my campus tour, though, was meeting a staff member called Sue who is also a carer for rescued wildlife.

Sue had a little black-footed rock wallaby staying with her, and he was nestled very comfortably in a fleece beanie. While we were there, he decided it was time for a little afternoon exercise, so we had the great pleasure of watching him bounce around the office for a while :)

He was quite a curious little chap, so we each got our feet sniffed and examined. I took a few photos - he's a fast little mover, so they came out a bit fuzzy unfortunately. But he was so adorable, especially when having a dance/wrestle with the hem of Sue's skirt, that I had to share them!







When the rock wallaby is ready to look after himself, he'll join the colony at Heavitree Gap in Alice Springs. These wallabies are accustomed to human company, and hand feeding them is a popular tourist activity.

This was such an unexpected treat - thank you to Sue and Leonie for a wonderful opportunity to meet a beautiful little fellow :)

I've been looking for a good excuse to use Wordle for ages, and I finally found one :)

This Wordle was created using the comments made by respondents in my recent survey about "Twitter for professional development and career progression". It will be part of my presentation to the ALIA Top End Symposium, 7-8 October 2011.


(click on the image to see a larger version)

Wordle generates "word clouds" (similar to tag clouds) that display the most commonly used words in the text that you provide. The words that appear most frequently appear in larger font, so that prevalent ideas come to the fore.

I love the words that pop out here - professional, people, network, library, development, contacts, useful, personal, learning, conference, information, social, ideas ...

Do you see what I did there?

Well if you don't, maybe you haven't come across needle felting before ... :)

It's a craft technique that involves shaping wool roving into, well, shapes. And then stabbing it again and again with a small barbed needle until the wool sticks (felts) together to become a solid mass in whatever shape you desire. There are many different colours of wool available, and different needles (fine or coarse) allow you to control the amount of detail.

Needle felting is most commonly used to create small animal sculptures and other three dimensional objects. It can also be used to felt two dimensional designs onto other materials. I'd show you a few examples from Flickr, but they would outshine my own poor efforts so much that I think I'll save it for a separate blog post ;)

Here's my first attempt - in which I discover that flowers are not necessarily suited to needle felting. They look awfully fuzzy *lol*. I was also making an attempt to move outside my colour comfort zone, so these colours are quite different to my usual choices. I've tried some shading here, using four different colours in the flower itself as well as another colour to stripe the leaves. The leaves are made from a purchased felt sheet, but I think it makes a nice contrast here.



For my second effort, I decided to go back to basics and concentrate on making some simple shapes. So I created this colourful little egg basket. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, and think it will make a nice brooch or Christmas tree ornament.



I'm not convinced that needle felting is the "next big thing" for me in terms of craft techniques. It's trickier than it looks, and I've found myself very frustrated on more than one occasion. I think maybe it's because I like neatness in my craft, and I've struggled to create the firm texture and surface on my early attempts that I'd like. It could just be that more practice is required. Or maybe I need to learn from another person face-to-face rather than from YouTube!

Anyway, I still have a bunch of wool roving and ideas for what I'd like to make with it, so I'll persevere a bit longer and see how my efforts pay off over time :)

Whoops - I thought I'd already published this blog post, but I just found it still languishing in my drafts folder *slaps forehead*

I received an absolutely amazing response to my survey on Twitter for professional development and career progression. I'm so grateful to the many, many people who took the survey. And to all those who retweeted (passed along) my survey info to their own Twitter followers - you definitely helped the survey reach a wider audience than it would have otherwise, and I really appreciate it!

I closed the survey after a week. I'd originally intended to keep it open for an extra week, but the law of diminishing returns was kicking in and the rate of survey responses was dropping off. And I got such a fabulous response that I was really happy with the numbers that had already come in :)

*drum roll* 161 survey responses! Yay! I told myself I would be satisfied with 20 for the purposes of my symposium presentation, but I was really hoping for 50 or more. The number of responses surpassed that figure in less than 24 hours. In fact they were nudging triple figures only a day after the survey was released!

I think that's proof in itself that Twitter is a fantastic tool for professional development and career progression ;) but of course I also now have 161 much appreciated pieces of evidence to work through and analyse on the topic. And I'm really looking forward to it! People have been so generous with their time, in not only answering the survey questions, but also providing valuable comments, and in many cases their contact details so that I can follow up on questions in future.

With such a great body of material to work with, I would be crazy not to do as much as I can with it. So once the ALIA Top End Symposium is over, I'll be investigating potential library journals for publishing the results in.

Again, thank you to all the people who helped me out by completing the survey. I will spread the word when my symposium presentation is available online so that you can check out for yourself the very interesting responses that were received :)

I've created a short survey (about 10 minutes) that seeks to answer some questions relating to how library and information workers use Twitter for professional development and career progression. The results will be presented at the ALIA Top End Symposium on 7-8 October 2011, and may be extended into a paper at a later date.

If you work (or study) in the library or information industry, please help me out by taking this survey. I would really appreciate it!

Here's the link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QC6WVBF

SurveyMonkey's web interface works really well on mobile phones too.

My presentation will be published to my SlideShare account in mid-October. I'll promote the link on Twitter and my blog when it is available :)

Thank you so much to everyone who has already completed the survey, as well as to those who have promoted it by retweeting. I've been blown away by your generosity and enthusiasm!

Edited to add: The survey is now closed.

Isn't it funny how a flurry of blogging activity (a la #blogeverydayofjune) is always followed by an extended burnout-induced hiatus :)

My energy levels have been at an all time low this year (possibly the topic of another blog post), and blogging has fallen to the bottom of the to-do list. In fact, a whole lot of things fell off my to-do list. But lately I've started to regain a bit of my former vim, and have been making an effort to get re-involved in the things I love - both online and offline.

One of the things I've been doing is catching up on my blog reading, and I want to make a special mention here of my friend Steph (aka Bookgrrl) who writes a terrific blog called There she goes. Steph has really inspired me to get back into blogging again, and to find my own voice. As well as being a great writer who entertains and connects with her readers, Steph has been really making an effort to blog consistently and let people get to know her. Thank you Steph for being a wonderful bloggy role model :)

So, I'm going to dust off some drafts and dream up some ideas - stay tuned :)

Scraping in a final blog post just before midnight - this one takes me to a total of 30 posts in 30 days. Not quite blogging every day, but I'm glad I've been able to catch up and do 30 posts.

It's been a bit of a mixed bag. I haven't always had the time or energy for insightful, engaging blog posts - but I hope the readers of this blog enjoyed at least some of my offerings during the month of June :)

For my final post, I don't have much to say except to tell you that I've just been to see X-Men: First Class and thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm generally not a fan of prequels, but this one definitely held its own and was a very entertaining film. Great performances, nice guest appearances, and some very awesome 1960s styling! I recommend it :)

Goodnight!

Tim has been exercising his culinary muscles in the kitchen lately. I was very lucky earlier this week that he decided to whip up some potato gnocchi from scratch - it was utterly delicious :)



I made this collage using Picasa.

♪ ♫ Madness, madness, they call it madness ♫ ♪

Madness were a little before my time. I first came across them through their appearances on the Young Ones, but didn't know their music well at the time it was released.



It was during my Uni days that I really discovered Madness and their music. I bought several CDs, including a fantastic imported singles collection from the now (sadly) defunct Gaslight Records store on Bourke St, Melbourne.

I totally fell in love. The music with its ska and pop influences, and the wonderful sounds of the piano, guitars, trumpet and saxophone. The lyrics, so offbeat and funny, but also sentimental. The vocals. The band's look, attitude and energy. A brilliant combination that is as fantastic to listen to now as it ever was.

I'd be hard pressed to choose a favourite song, there are so many that I love. Baggy Trousers, Our House, Return Of The Los Palmas 7, One Better Day, My Girl, The Sun and the Rain, It Must Be Love, One Step Beyond, Yesterday's Men, Embarrassment, The Prince, Michael Caine, Night Boat to Cairo, House of Fun, Wings of a Dove, Swan Lake.

Madness has an official YouTube channel, which is definitely worth checking out. It has all the original music videos, as well as live performances and interviews.







A few years ago, I learnt that Madness were reforming every once in a while to perform in open air concerts for fans, called Madstock. I was so excited to get my hands on a DVD of one of these gigs. And then I discovered they were coming to Australia!

Here are a couple of the dodgy photos I took in 2009 during their show at the Metro in Melbourne. Absolutely wonderful, it was a dream come true to see them perform live :)