I was only DREaMing

Hmmmm...[ref item 17]

A few Mondays ago I was lucky enough to participate in the second LIS DREaM workshop at the British Library in old London town. Developing Research Excellence and Methods is an AHRC funded project which aims to develop a formal UK-wide network of Library and Information Science (LIS) researchers.

The workshop materials are all available online (including video of the presentations) and others have already done a fantastic job of blogging the day. So, I'm pinching Dan Slee's UK GovCamp '20 things' as a format for some reflections:

1. User involvement in research is a hot issue and getting hotter. There is a growing canon of work and it's increasingly a funding requirement. Professor Peter Beresford's inspiring presentation (given refreshingly without any PowerPoint!) outlined the challenges - personal, ethical and methodological - that this presents for us all as service users, researchers and policy makers.
2. It is possible to get a perfectly nice (if a little eccentric) hotel in central London for under £50 (B&B).
3. Ella Taylor Smith (@Ellatasm) and Lauren Smith (@walkyouhome) are both embarking on very interesting PhDs that touch on digital participation, libraries and democratic engagement. Particularly relevant right now. Will be keeping a close eye on both of these.
4. That's not to say that others are not doing interesting research as well. The proof can be found via the video of the 'unconference' half hour when some of us talked about our research interests.
5. I can live without paper. For five days anyway. That was a bit of revelation for me - one that warrants a blog post all of its own.
6. The cafe in the British Library serves the biggest muffins in the world. The wifi is pretty tasty as well.
7. I have yet to be disappointed when I've met IRL people I know only from Twitter.
8. Despite a great presentation from Dr Thomas Haigh on 'techniques from history', I will not be doing historical research any time soon. History was my best subject at school and I was advised to study it at uni. So I did. And pretty much hated every minute of those four years. During the workshop exercise, we discussed how we might apply historical methods to my research interest in the LIS profession in government. And I can see how it would be useful. But it does not inspire any passion...which leads me onto...
9. Nick Moore made a great point in his presentation on 'research and policy' about motivation. Real interest in, and indeed, a passion for, your area of research are essential, especially if you want to inform policy. Now, I'm interested in lots of aspects of LIS...but I'm not sure what I'm passionate about. Need to give that some thought.
10. I must have a chatelaine. Saw some beautiful ones at the V&A. I have some ideas for a modern version.
11. Sentiment analysis seems to have come a long way since I first became aware of it a couple of years ago. Still not convinced of its usefullness though, despite the interesting stuff going on at the University of Wolverhampton's Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, which Mike Thelwall talked about during his presentation on 'webometrics'. I'm going to have a play with SentiStrength though.
12. Am already looking forward to the final workshop (at Edinburgh Napier University on 25 April), which will include a presentation on data mining.
13. The Pajama Men are hilarious. Go see them.
14. I love my iPad :) [ref item 5.] I am ever so grateful to my Mum for giving me one. Thanks Mum!
15. There was some interest in my T-shirt - which was a Christmas pressie from t'other 'alf. You can get one from his Red Bubble site.
16. The DREaM Project is a very slick operation. Offline and online content combine seamlessly (I was unable to attend the first workshop, but viewing the comprehensive online content was almost as good as being there in person), pre-workshop information was very thorough and the event itself went very smoothly. Kudos to Hazel Hall and Charles Oppenheim and Christine Irving, Kirsty Pipkin and others involved.
17. However...because the online content is so comprehensive, I'd have liked the workshop to have made more of the opportunities of having us together - with a greater level of interactivity and more opportunities for discussion. Although it's nice to meet people IRL, I don't think I'd have felt that I'd missed out if I hadn't been able to attend in person.
18. I am too old to mooch round Camden High Street of a Sunday :(
19. Having been lucky enough to be involved with the project, I need to start thinking about how I might apply the techniques. This is very timely. And tempting...but I'm not sure that I'm ready to go back to full time study. Not just yet.

Amazing things are happening in Scotland...

One of my public sector digital inspirations, Dan Slee (Walsall Council), recently made some predications about digital in local government in 2012, including this one:

12. Amazing things will happen in Scotland. Some of the brightest people in the public sector who are innocavating aren’t in London. They’re north of the border serving as police officers as well as in local government. It’ll be fascinating to see how this develops.

Which is nice.

It’s good to get a more objective perspective. I’ve been feeling a bit disheartened recently by (what seems to me anyway) our lack of progress on the digital front and have been looking south with jealous eyes. On reflection, I think this is actually more to do with people not talking enough about the good stuff they're doing rather than no good stuff happening at all (is it the Scottish Calvinist thing?).

And I this year certainly does have the potential to be a very interesting one for digital in Scotland (and hopefully that means lots for me to blog about!). 

We’ve certainly got things off to a cracking start with the announcement of #Tartantm - concurrent TweetUps for public sector types in all the major Scottish cities on the evening of 22 February.

It’s ambitious. But it’s got two of our most dedicated public sector social media advocates, Carolyne Mitchell (South Lanarkshire Council) and Gordon Scobbie (Deputy Chief Constable of Tayside Police) behind it (assisted by others around the country), so it can’t fail.

If you work in the public sector and are interested in using social media to engage or to build online communities, you should get yourself along for food, chatting and tweeting. There's more info at http://tartantweeple.wordpress.com/.

So, I’ll see you there! (And if you really can’t be there – and you’d better have a damn good excuse - then follow the Twitter hashtag #tartantm.)

Forgive me blogosphere, it’s been six months since my last post

To be honest, I wasn’t even going to bother today, then I noticed that I’d had 250+ views last night (from Russia?!). Thought I should give them something new to read should they return tonight.

Looking back, I was very clear that this blogging lark was primarily a selfish enterprise – I hoped blogging would encourage my reflective practice – and if anyone else found anything useful, then great, but it wasn’t my primary objective.

As time has gone on, I’ve had some really good conversations here, made connections with people that I wouldn’t have otherwise and been asked to do fun stuff off the back of what I’ve written here. And people do seem to have found at least some of my ramblings interesting/useful.  Which is nice. There has even been some reflection on my part :)

But the last six months have been very disappointing for me professionally. I don’t think there’s any need to go into the detail here, but suffice to say, I’ll be glad to see the back of 2011. There’s been very little to blog about, and when there has been something to write about I've not really been in the mood to do it.

But, I'm hoping for better things in the new year and look forward to get my blogging mojo back on! I can't be having a go at the lack of public sector blogging in Scotland if I’m not doing any myself.