Reflective Practice. Where have I been for the last three weeks?

I have been reflecting, quite a lot, but also haven't blogged about my thoughts (though I have woken up in the night composing ideas). Now I've finally got back to it, much of the thinking has flown off into the trash bin of undigested ideas, so I'm going to just quickly summarise the key things:

 It's really important for me to capture the reflective thought; time goes by, things happen, the thinking gets abandoned at a very unprocessed stage. I know this, but it's the hardest thing for me to do. I can use all sorts of excuses - been REALLY busy at the end of term, when I always feel like a lemming racing towards a cliff (everyone else seems to be already down there on the beach). Been REALLY busy at home - completing a year's house buying/selling endless DIY etc. And so on. But the key thing is when the thinking gets harder or I'm not properly engaged, I lose interest, then I get very lazy about doing the reflection.

Thus, the social networking Things - Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin - left me feeling confused bombarded with messy looking webpages, so much STUFF. It really doesn't appeal to me much at all. I can see Twitter would be really useful in very particular circumstances - other bloggers have mentioned conferences, meetings; or I can see that it's good for breaking news. But actually I haven't a clue what most of it means - just deciphering the "code" puts me off.

Facebook I'm sure is great for whatever networking you might want to use it for. Just at the moment if I want to be in touch with my family or friends I go and see them! Or possible phone/ text/ email. But as my mobile phone is mostly buried at the bottom of my bag and might get out about once a week, you can see that I'm a person who doesn't really need to be connected all the time.

Linkedin looked very professional and I can see that would be an excellent tool for getting your profile "out there". If I was in the market for a job (and who knows with all the cuts??) then it's something I might consider. But I am still seriously protective of my personal privacy and so I'm not sure how I feel about having my CV online.

Much of my reflection on these social networking sites has been an uncomfortable, defensive feeling that I'm really not at all interested in much of it, that it feels like an intrusion, lots of "twitter", and that I must be a bit of an old fogey.

Happily I can remind myself that although I am probably quite a bit older than many of the cpd23 participants, I am not living in the dark ages, and am quite capable and competent at many techie things. Just not very sociable! And that's really the key to the whole thing. I am really more interested in silence than noise, and quite a lot of what I'm seeing on these sites is very noisy. What I need are some really good filters so that I can just get the bits I'm really interested in, and only once, rather than repeated on every interface.

So at the end of this social networking Thing, I have - completely deactivated my Twitter accounts. Not even dipped my toe in Facebook, made a mental note of Linkedin.

Finally, I have been really heartened to read other people's blogs which echo my feelings, so I don't feel like quite such a weirdo.

Now I've just got to catch up with all those other things I haven't finished thinking about.