Please Bless These Seeds I Sow
Hmm. It has been one heckuva long week, and I'm relieved to see Saturday.
The portfolio exercise was revealing. I realized that I need to rethink whether I need a portfolio, and if so, how best to produce one. As a technical writer and instructional design consultant, it seemed essential. Now that I'm a whatever-I-am, I'm not so sure that producing a portfolio doesn't brand me as - what, a worker? As opposed to a thinker and manager? I'm not sure. For crying out loud, I work for a living. Does that necessarily imply that I don't think?
The resume needs a complete overhaul, too. It simply doesn't represent me accurately.
Looking over the past couple of years, I realize that I have built up some expertise in using collaborative and web technologies such as blogging. A lot of professionals of all stripes seem to be intimidated by technologies beyond email. I'd like to position myself as someone who can strategize around collaborative technologies, bring them into organizations, and nurture their acceptance and use. Years ago this was sometimes called knowledge management, and that idea seems to have died a dramatic and slow death. I think this was because it never got to be something that anyone other than technology specialists and sociologists understood. If we take a humanistic approach to it, would it be more widely accepted?
I see blogging as one of the ways I exercise these technology-collaboration muscles. So I plan to go about blogging a little more deliberately in the next few months as I build and solidify strengths in this area. You'll begin to notice some more bells and whistles on this site as well as the others I host as I experiment a little more actively. I think I may also try another blog hosting site, too, and build a new, more professionally oriented blog.
I will probably also begin trying some new things, like podcasting. I'd like to start by recording and producing the first MPOD book club meeting. It will be a challenge, because I have almost no idea of where to begin. I'll spend some of this holiday weekend researching that. If you know anything about where I should begin with podcasting, I'd love to hear from you.
I invite you to comment on your experiences with my blog, be they oriented toward the content or the technology. Right now I'm especially interested in these questions: if you subscribe to this blog or another of my blogs - how do you subscribe? Which aggregator do you use? Does it work with this blog? Are you more likely to subscribe by email, using the form that I've just uploaded from Feedburner? Does the name Feedburner make you nervous? (It certainly makes me nervous!)
It might seem a little presumptuous on my part to assume any readership at all, but I've recently started using Google Analytics, and it turns out that every so often a few people do drop in! My analysis of the stats suggests to me that these are more or less random hits based on an unusual title or subject I'm blogging about.
All in all, I'll be doing some capacity building this summer.
The portfolio exercise was revealing. I realized that I need to rethink whether I need a portfolio, and if so, how best to produce one. As a technical writer and instructional design consultant, it seemed essential. Now that I'm a whatever-I-am, I'm not so sure that producing a portfolio doesn't brand me as - what, a worker? As opposed to a thinker and manager? I'm not sure. For crying out loud, I work for a living. Does that necessarily imply that I don't think?
The resume needs a complete overhaul, too. It simply doesn't represent me accurately.
Looking over the past couple of years, I realize that I have built up some expertise in using collaborative and web technologies such as blogging. A lot of professionals of all stripes seem to be intimidated by technologies beyond email. I'd like to position myself as someone who can strategize around collaborative technologies, bring them into organizations, and nurture their acceptance and use. Years ago this was sometimes called knowledge management, and that idea seems to have died a dramatic and slow death. I think this was because it never got to be something that anyone other than technology specialists and sociologists understood. If we take a humanistic approach to it, would it be more widely accepted?
I see blogging as one of the ways I exercise these technology-collaboration muscles. So I plan to go about blogging a little more deliberately in the next few months as I build and solidify strengths in this area. You'll begin to notice some more bells and whistles on this site as well as the others I host as I experiment a little more actively. I think I may also try another blog hosting site, too, and build a new, more professionally oriented blog.
I will probably also begin trying some new things, like podcasting. I'd like to start by recording and producing the first MPOD book club meeting. It will be a challenge, because I have almost no idea of where to begin. I'll spend some of this holiday weekend researching that. If you know anything about where I should begin with podcasting, I'd love to hear from you.
I invite you to comment on your experiences with my blog, be they oriented toward the content or the technology. Right now I'm especially interested in these questions: if you subscribe to this blog or another of my blogs - how do you subscribe? Which aggregator do you use? Does it work with this blog? Are you more likely to subscribe by email, using the form that I've just uploaded from Feedburner? Does the name Feedburner make you nervous? (It certainly makes me nervous!)
It might seem a little presumptuous on my part to assume any readership at all, but I've recently started using Google Analytics, and it turns out that every so often a few people do drop in! My analysis of the stats suggests to me that these are more or less random hits based on an unusual title or subject I'm blogging about.
All in all, I'll be doing some capacity building this summer.
posted by tinotchka at 2:18 PM
1 Comments:
.....i'll tell you all that i know.
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