This is just the beginning......

.....but I'm already having a bit of technology overload!!  I'm learning about tools I've never even heard of, such as Evernote and Diigo (which I now have on both my laptop and iphone), and I'm finally being forced (in a good way!) to take a much closer look at Mendeley, which I first heard about close to a year ago.  After attending the webinar yesterday and talking about it in class last night, I really wish I had jumped on the Mendeley bandwagon sooner.  I'm very excited about the potential for this tool and definitely plan to work with it for one of my skill building activities.

I'm realizing more and more that as a consumer of technology, I'm going to have to become much more proactive in embracing the possibility of digital tools for my academic work and research.  I am a procrastinator by nature, not because I am lazy or don't want to do something, but because I have some perfectionist tendencies and only want to do something when I know I have adequate time to "do it right".  Unfortunately, this causes me to miss out on some great opportunities to learn about new ways of doing things because I'm stuck in the here and now of what absolutely must be accomplished on a daily basis.  This personality trait finds me left behind when it comes to new technology, among other things, because I take this "someday when I have a little more time" mentality about playing around with various tools.  And let's face it---"someday" is never going to come!  So, as a professional and an academic, I am going to try to make more of an effort to just play around with tools a bit when I hear about them and see potential in them, even if it means not being able to fully devote my time to them (which is hard for a perfectionist!!). 

On another note, I really enjoyed our class conversation about conducting literature reviews.  I always live in dread of writing literature reviews.  It's such a tedious and messy process of wading through material and narrowing that material to what is actually going to be useful and applicable.  Last night's conversation didn't alleviate any of my feelings in that regard, BUT I did walk away with some insights into taking more ownership of the process.  I especially like the idea of explicitly describing how I conducted my searches, where I searched, and how I decided what to include/not include.  I feel like laying all of those delimitations on the table, so to speak, will give me a bit more confidence, especially in situations like proposal defense, and dissertation defense, if my methods and sources in the literature review are challenged.  At least I will have reasons outlined to help me defend my actions.