I have jumped into a great professional development course called ANZ 23 Mobile Things. It’s for people in Australia and New Zealand doing Jan, Mylee & Kathryn‘s ultra cool 23 Mobile Things course. We’re going to learn all that is vital to know about how mobile devices can awesome-ise library people, library programs and spaces. The major reason I signed up for the course is because about 2 weeks ago I was ‘given’ an iPad for work. My daughter has one which I have barely used, and I have always wanted to start. This course seemed like the perfect starting point! The other reasons I have signed up are: group-learning is awesome, the price is right (FREE!), and professional development is very important to me.
In the past I started CPD23 but never finished. Twice! I’m ok with that; self-paced learning is about dipping in and dipping out. I played with a few of the things, but never got into a pattern. I absolutely learnt stuff and still follow hashtags and people from the course. Perhaps the biggest thing I did learn was, I did not set aside enough time to play and learn. Of course I hope to remedy this, and will do this by allotting work-time to complete the course. I can always go back and finish CPD23, and the other cool thing is, ANZ 23 Mobile Things is different because it is about using mobile devices.
Thing 1 was all about Twitter – excellent! I totally love twitter. In 2011 I declared Twitter & RSS to be the best things on the Internet. I still think this is true. Here’s what I tweeted last week: “Top reasons I <3 @twitter: real-time searching, quick advice, virtually attend events, link sharing, short, sharp convos, stay up-2-date, democratising the web (can ask any1 anything), it’s a community!”. Currently I use the official twitter app on my Galaxy (android) phone and on my iPad. My desktop preference is the old Tweetdeck. I also sometimes use Hootsuite on my desktop at work. If you can recommend a great mobile app, please leave me a comment 
Heaps of the learning for the course will take place on twitter; so get amongst it. Search for and tweet using the hashtag #anz23mthings. To get news from the source follow @anz23mthings. Oh and make sure you grab the RSS feeds from the course site.
I’m very excited to be actively learning, sharing and playing again.
I’m certain the course will remind me how the words learning, sharing and playing are wonderful tautologies!