Introducing 23 Things

Welcome to 23 Things! Over the next 12 weeks you should be introduced to some useful online tools to help you in your job and in your Continuous Professional Development (CPD).

This is a self-directed learning programme - you can take as much or as little time as you like over each activity. All the learning materials will appear here on this blog.

How does it work?

• Every week, there will be two posts on this blog, introducing two 'Things'. This may not be two separate tools - you might be given two Things to do with just the one tool in a given week
• Over the 12 weeks the whole thing is divided up into themes: Publishing Online, Social Networking, Collaboration, Time Management, and Multimedia 
• Each post will be about what a tool is, how it works, why it's useful, and then an activity so you can try it out
• You then blog about your experiences (Thing 1 is setting up a blog, so you will all have one...), read each others' posts, discuss whether or not the tools are for you in the Comments section and so on
• Around half-way through there's a little interval, where the Things are reflection and catching up 
• At the end of it all one person will win a prize at the staff festival - a £100 Amazon voucher 

A full list of the 23 Things can be found here - but the blog posts themselves will appear twice a week as we go on. To release all the information and activities at once would probably be overwhelming.

Hopefully that makes it clear, but if not then please leave a comment below this post to ask a question. There's also plenty more information on the About page. 

Why take part? 

There are loads of really useful tools online, which aren't just for the very technologically savvy or the technogeeks, and which help solve existing problems or otherwise make life easier (rather than just being new and shiny but not really doing much). This programme is an easy way to keep up with what might be useful in your working life, without spending huge amounts of time doing so. The tools you learn to use will hopefully save you time in the long-run - and ultimately, taking part in 23 Things should be fun! They've been run successfully at Libraries across the world, and people get a lot out of them. 

What do I do next?

The first and essential step is to subscribe to this blog. You can either put your email address into the 'Get new posts email to you as they arrive' box, on the right. Or use the 'Subscribe to this blog' button to subscribe to the RSS feed (we'll be finding out more about RSS feeds in Thing 3). 

Once you've created your own blog (the instructions for which will be in a new post published later on Monday) you can register your blog using this Google form. 

Any questions? Leave them in a comment below, or email me (ned.potter). 

Good luck!