Thing 2

I fear I am falling a little behind! I’ve been feeling a bit gloomy and directionless over the past few days and have needed some time away from all things LIS to get my thoughts together and work out what I’m doing. I am feeling much more my usual self now though, so here I am!

Thing 2 was to read and comment on some other blogs. I’ve been doing this by looking at those posted by people I follow on Twitter, searching for them under the #cpd23 hashtag, and looking through the Delicious bookmarks set up by the CPD23 organisers. I can’t get over how many participants there are – so many blogs!

I’m no stranger to blogging so reading and commenting wasn’t a new experience for me. What I have really enjoyed about looking up other CPD23 blogs, though, is seeing how many people have started a blog for this project; people who were unsure about blogging, didn’t know where to start or didn’t think they had anything worth saying have been encouraged to take that first step of creating their blog and announcing themselves to the LIS world. Some of these new bloggers were already involved in the online LIS community through Twitter, others don’t (yet!) use Twitter and are entirely new to the community. Over the past week I have spoken a lot about my worries that there are barriers created by perceptions which prevent people from feeling able to join in online, and that they are thus missing out on the opportunities for engagement, learning and inspiration that can be found there. CPD23 is already acting as a successful means of bringing people into the community that so many of us value, and I am pleased to see this happening. I look forward to reading all of the blogs that I can throughout CPD23, but perhaps especially those of the new bloggers.