7 1/2 Habits

This was inspiring. I don't always remind myself that learning is continual. Everything you do from daily activities to watching movies teach you something. I liked that they mentioned playing as a way of learning-that's what we did as kids! It was very strategic to put this 2nd in the list of 23 Things. I should have started here first! Anyway, it was motivating. The nature of a librarian's work needs to be conducive to learning. The responsibilities a librarian has requires constant learning-as well as adapting to new forms of technology and information retrieval. Information is continual and never ending, as is the librarian's task to learn.

I am glad I did this thing today because I had ran into some seriously stressful programs online. In another class, I had to create a tutorial for a hypothetical situation. I had to pretend I was a librarian that had just been asked for help in reference. That wasn't the hard part. I had to become familiar with a program named JING which allows you to record what you are doing on your computer. This was really neat, however, it did take some trial and error. After playing with it for a while, I couldn't find how to add captions. I surfed the web for tutorials-thank you YouTube! I found this program called Camtasia that allows you to edit and add caption to video. Now this tool really gave me a hard time, however, I finally got it. BUT, then I couldn't save it as a .swf as was required by the assignment. Then, I had to try another program named Screencast to get it over to the professor. SUCCESS! The point of the story is that I have to spruce up my technological abilities because I was honestly very stressed getting that project together.

Librarians can find this useful in their career path by using it as a motto. It is a great way for aspiring librarians to stay on track and it is a great tool to motivate current librarians to shoot for the stars. It could be part of a training program and a model to promote success in your career.

The hardest habit for me would be number 3 "View problems as challenges." As unfortunate as this sounds, I am one of those individuals that gets very stressed out with technology. This is something I am truly going to have to work at because my future occupation will revolve around technology. It is also advantageous for me to learn such technology for personal reasons-it makes the world go 'round---faster. I need to remind myself that learning sometimes requires a challenge, but never a problem.

My easiest habit is wonderful number 7 and a 1/2..PLAY! One thing I didn't mention about the project I was talking about earlier was that I did get to play a bit. I made some cool practice videos, which ultimately showed me how to use the programs. Perhaps I need to keep this in mind when tackling new (stressful) technology.