Career chapters, thinking through writing, learning in public, and personal knowledge management, or: You have to start somewhere, so here I am.

I have a problem. It's not a bad problem. I'm in the building stage of a new chapter in my career. In 2019 I switched from being a medical librarian primarily focused on evidence-based practice and reproducibility, to building and overseeing an academic makerspace. I also got tenure, became the co-chair of our department, went through the pandemic, got older, etc. etc. etc.

Things are great. I've never been as professionally engaged. I work with a wonderful team and have supportive administration. Interesting things are happening every day and I'm constantly learning. .

But I haven't produced much academic writing the past few years. Partly that was due to burn out from my old job and then the apathy of the pandemic, and partly that has been intentional as I wait to have something to say. A lot is now because I'm busy in ways I've never been busy before and there is very little time to reflect or write.

I am reading and taking notes a lot. About what other spaces have done, but also about constructivism and other learning theories, emergent leadership, assessment, belonging, Indigenization, and a dozen other tangents that are influencing the way I am thinking about the work I do or understand what I am seeing.

The world of personal knowledge management, or #pkm, has always been a double-edged sword for me. I've adopted a lot of platforms over the years. I'm not even going to try to list them. Currently I am using Obsidian which I like a lot. But I have a compulsion to constantly try new tools and fiddle endlessly with settings and paradigms, to the extent that it gets in the way of actually getting work done.

But one thing I have learned from both smart colleagues and parts of the #pkm world is that writing is key to turning notes into understanding, and learning in public can be a powerful way to produce meaningful content.

So that is what I am going to try here. This isn't a blog. It's a place for thinking. I am going to try to not worry about being perfect. I'm dyslexic and have terrible, almost comic spelling and grammar, but I'm going to try not to worry about either. Instead I am just going to use this space to think through, mostly in obscurity, what I am working on and thinking about in the hope that it helps me square the excitement and wish to produce something useful with the tendency to read and take a lot of notes.

Or at least that is the plan.

find me at: https://code4lib.social/@pepperonibookmark