Blogging for Chartership

DAVID BRUCE

I spent a lot of time thinking about what I could share with my peers that:

1) might get them interested in blogging as part of their Chartership and
2) might help others who are already doing so.

I was a novice blogger when I started my Chartership so this is an introduction, not an expert’s overview.

So, why choose a blog? Before I’d even registered to pursue my Chartership, I had been reading several blogs for a couple of years. I was interested in the technology and what it could do in terms of sharing knowledge but had never got as far as trying it out. When my mentor suggested that I start keeping a journal as part of my Chartership journey, a blog seemed like a good opportunity to try things out first-hand; it would provide me with a bit of a learning experience as well as meeting a practical need. I figured, if nothing else, that it would provide me with a quick and easy way to write up my mentoring meeting notes and share them with my mentor without sending emails back and forth (clogging up email accounts, having to file multiple word documents and trying to keep track of versions). A wiki could also have been used to meet this need but blogging was new enough and I was happy to keep it all in one place from an administrative perspective. I am using my blog (http://djlbchartership.blogspot.com/) to capture learning from training and my day-to-day work, thoughts and learning from conferences and seminars, and relevant meeting notes for example benchmarking visits.

As much of an advocate as I am for blogging as part of your Chartership application, it is not without its disadvantages. As with email, the tone of your musings can seem more contentious/assertive to others than you intend. You also need to be aware of what your practical experience entries say about your employer. Every organisation presents its challenges but most wouldn’t be happy having them aired to the world. As a result, many organisations have employee blog policies and it is worth the time for you to check whether your employer has one and if so, what it says. My employer doesn’t have any such policy. After keeping my blog private for a couple of months (viewable only by invitation), I asked my line manager to have a look at it and to comment on whether he could see any reason why I shouldn’t make it public.

There have also been a few unanticipated advantages to using a blog as part of my Chartership application:

1. It removes the hassle of having to keep things carefully organised in a folder on my PC. I know we’re librarians and we should relish in this kind of thing but I’m always looking for more efficient ways of achieving the same result. Using the tagging facility in the blog software, I can make sure that all of the entries that pertain to a particular topic can be filtered. For example, in assembling my portfolio and completing my Personal Professional Development Log, I use the tags that I have applied to the entries to pull out the evidence and reading that matches the categories of my Personal Professional Development Plan.

2. Having all of this content stored on the Web means that I can access it from any PC at any time. Obtaining Chartership is one of my objectives at work, so I’m lucky enough to be able to spend some time on this at work as well as at home; not being bound to one PC makes this much simpler.

3. Finally, and probably most importantly, it has led me to develop quite a few contacts that I wouldn’t otherwise have made thus widening my professional network. By making the blog public, people can find it through Google or (in my case) Blogger searches but the most effective way of promoting it and making that contact is to participate in the LIS-BLOGGERS listserv and to visit other candidates’ blogs and make comments; in my experience, they will reciprocate!

I’m not going to get into the different types of software you can use to create your own blog – the list simply too long. I suggest that you check out the Wikipedia entry on weblog software for a comprehensive list and explanation of the different types - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog_software. If you want to get a blog started, one piece of advice I have is to pay attention to the functionality that the different options offer (transferring your blog from one host to another is not a simple or fun task). For example, some software makes handling those contentious entries that you might not want to be made public a little more difficult. Others will let you flag an entry as ‘Private’ meaning that only invited people can view the entry. Blogger, and many others, don’t offer this functionality leaving you three options.

You can:
1. not make your blog public – only invited guests will be able to read your entries but this limits who can comment on your entries as well

2. not write the entry you’d rather keep private but this means losing that record or having to keep it somewhere separately

3. save the entry as ‘draft’ meaning that no one can view or comment on that entry but the rest of your blog is unaffected – this is what I have chosen to do

Although the blog itself is a form of evidence of professional development, I am planning on including a couple of paragraphs in my supporting statement along with the URL rather than including a print out of the whole thing. Having said that, I think that blogging as part of Chartership is the way of the future. It’s free to get started and doesn’t require much technical knowledge either to set up or to maintain. The functionality of blogs makes accumulating and organising evidence and documenting thoughts and learning simple. Certainly in my case, it will form an integral component of my submission.

Finally the fun of blogging is its interactive nature, so please do let me know if you found this article of any use; I look forward to your comments, questions and ideas on my web log!

David Bruce

David Bruce currently works as Knowledge Manager in Research and Development at the Rail Safety and Standards Board. He maintains his chartership blog at http://djlbchartership.blogspot.com/, contributed to the unofficial Umbrella 2007 conference wiki at http://clippers2007.pbwiki.com/, and welcomes your comments and questions on his weblog or via email at djlbruce@gmail.com.