This blog's purpose seems to shift with whatever my focus is at the time. At this moment, since visiting the doctor and being told I am overweight, it is getting fit. I am 5' 5" and 168 kg which makes my BMI 25 - on the borderline between healthy and overweight. This was quite a shock as I have always been skinny and now I'm .. not. Which is mainly the result of being happy and not worrying the weight off, but also of not doing enough exercise.

So! I am trying to eat more healthily (brown rice! fruit! no cheese!) and am doing Yogalates and the NHS Couch to 5k running programme. I just got back from first run (20 minutes of walking 90 second and running 60) and I look like a beetroot. For some reason only my face goes red when I run. Neck - white as a swan, face - red as a turkey's. It doesn't help that today is beautiful and sunny, so the park was full of families BBQing and topless, drinking men. I get rather self-conscious about exercising in public, which is something I am going to have to overcome, unless I stick to yoga in my living room.

But I managed, though maybe my 90 second walks weren't as energetic as they should have been. I found the podcast useful, rather than having to check my watch all the time, but I think I'm going to be sick of the same music for the rest of the week. There is an app available that gives you prompts over the top of your own music, which I would much prefer if I had an iPhone. My walking home music consisted of Helen Reddy - I am Woman, Christina Aguilera - Fighter and some Get up Kids, and I think my next run will be motivated by Bruce Springsteen.

Has anyone else done this programme? How did you find it?

Thing 4.. I think

I am on holiday from work. So far this has involved:

- visiting lovely university friends in Sheffield
- quite a bit of sleeping in, watching daytime TV and eating cheese
- spending a tenner in Amnesty bookshop on some wonderful-looking books
- discovering that I actually love swimming, but then being sad that I'm not really meant to do it with contact lenses in
- doing an awful lot of very boring admin (hello BT, HMRC, Barclays etc)
- trying to organise my RSS feedreader

See! My musings are relevant to the topic. So far I have organised folders into:

- Culture
- Digital
- Museums
- Libraries
- Lifestyle
- People
- Politics
- Self-improvement
- Funny

Digital is what I call things that aren't specifically museums/libraries but are still relevant to areas I work, especially freelance projects I sometimes do. One of these may be coming up, so I am trying to keep up with developments here.

I like RSS a lot. It is much better than the alternative of horribly-organised bookmarks (which is where I am currently transferring things from), and it makes reading blogs feel like work (which, of course, it is). I do get frustrated with blogs that aren't very RSS-friendly and which force you to 'Open in browser' to actually see the content.

Twitter

I love Twitter. I really love Twitter an awful lot, and get rather annoyed by people who are dismissive of it, because it is so brilliant and useful for keeping up with what is going on in the world, as well as being a good distraction on my horribly long commute (except for in the signal blackspots of rural Northumberland). I follow a wide range of folk, from funny famous people (mainly columnists) to museum and library geeks (I include myself in this) and a few people I actually know.

I am yet to try Pushnote, but it doesn't seem immediately useful to me from reading about it. I wil endeavour to try though.

Today was a good day at work

When I'm not working as Education Assistant, I'm also a Visitor Assistant at weekends. Today was awesome because:

- when I was working at the outside visitor entrance I got to hang out with a teenage red squirrel and some birds
- there was an amazing mother, who was doing the best job ever of showing her kids around. She was asking them really interesting questions, getting them to link their experiences to the exhibits, sharing family history, being really encouraging of their colouring in. But she wasn't some super-pushy yummy mumm, she was just a lovely ordinary mum on a day out with her family.
- I was on the front desk being smiley and lovely (as I always am!) and on the way out, one man thanked me for my help in describing where everything was in the museum, and said he wished he knew my name so he could have written it on his very positive comment form. Then he left. Then he came back in and asked my name so he could write another comment.
- it was beautifuly sunny and everyone was really happy and there were lots of adorable families.

And now it's time for a glass of wine, some pizza and Sister Act.

Considering my personal brand

Task 3 of cpd23 is to 'consider my personal brand'. To do this, I thought I would look at the various ways in which I present myself online. I don't worry too much about potential employers seeing photos of me, because I don't think there are any incriminating photos of me out there - the worst you could see is me grinning with a glass of wine.

On Twitter, I recently changed my name from my real name to dorotheainrome, partly so it matches this blog, but also because I am scared of talking about work under my real name. I don't even really talk about work, but I do use Twitter for networking purposes. To be honest, I should probably have a personal account and a work one, but the boundary is so fluid for me (a lot of friends are also colleagues; personal interests are potential freelance opportunities) that I don't know what would go where. So I just stick to trying not to swear too much. My profile is mainly disclaimer:

'Museum educator with tendency for self-deprecation and being a little passionate (ranty) about politics and such.All views expressed are mine and not employers'

.. which is typically self-deprecating, and shows that I also feel awkward about how passionate I can get!

My Facebook profile has the following as a quotation:
"It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them. How can we ever be satisfied without them until our feelings are deadened?" Yet more George Eliot, this time from Mill on the Floss.

So far it seems I want to hide my identity while on the internet, whilst also showing quite a lot of my personality. Curious.

This also got me thinking about what my personal brand is in person. I recently realised that what I had thought was an endearing quality - telling amusing stories about my inability to get the correct bus etc - was actually me undermining myself. I think I may have started doing this in order to not seem stuck-up or intimidating. I used to be quite shy, and people always thought I was being aloof, but it seems to have backfired, and I am now making a conscious effort not to do myself down, especially while at work.

What do you think your offline personal brand is?

Thing 2: Blogging

I read a lot of blogs. A lot. I use Feedreader to collect them and go through phases. I recently spent far too long reading about unattainably beautiful interior design, crafts and fashion before feeling guilty and finding more work-related blogs. I recently worked on a freelance project researching museums, technology and participation, so still follow a lot of the blogs I found through this.

I love Claire Ross's Digital Nerdosaurus blog because she always seems to be working so hard and her passion for what she writes about really inspires me. She talks about projects in the Digital Humanities that I find very interesting and I think she balances professionalism and personal insight really well.

I'm noticing a theme in the blogs I'm choosing to write about - what I really admire about them is their dedication to what they do. Nina Simon at Museum 2.0 went from working as an educator in museums 10 years ago to setting up her own consultancy and writing about museums, technology and participation to being Executive Director of the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz. She writes about really complicated issues of participatory experiences in museums in a very down-to-earth way (and I used her theories as part of my dissertation on this!)

Right, I need to go away and do some commenting and then I'll report back on what else I've found.

A way to get me writing

I have signed up to take part in the very exciting looking http://cpd23.blogspot.com
which is a 'self-directed course aimed at introducing you to a range of tools that could help your personal and professional development as a librarian, information professional or something else.' I'm a something else, being a museum and archives educator, but think this encouragement in my blogging and professional development will be really useful.

Thing No. 1 is blogging. I have been on internet forums since I was 14 (hello embarrassing nu-metal bands..) written on Livejournal since I was 17, and am a regular on Facebook and Twitter. But I've never quite managed blogging. There is something about the private/public thing, especially when it relates to work that makes me really uncomfortable. I always worry about saying the wrong thing (normally at exhibition openings when I get anxious about free wine making me loose-tongued) and writing about work just seems to be asking for that to happen. So I am never too obvious about where I work - it wouldn't be too hard to guess from where I am and what I do, but I feel better if I don't make it explicit. Especially as I prefer this blog to about learning more generally, and not specifically as it applies to my job at the time (which is a bit of an issue with the increasing popularity of fixed-term contracts!)

I do spend a lot of time reading up about archives/museums/libraries/digital culture on the internet, and I see this project as a way to structure the CPD I've maybe been doing without realising it, and to give me an opportunity to reflect on and share what I've found.

A professional update

I did indeed manage to find a part-time job to supplement the amazing freelancing, and am now working 3 days a week in museum education, which is rather wonderful.

I have come back to the blogging world, and am attempting to be more reliable than I normally am. I never feel very comfortable with publicly blogging about work, so intend to make this blog more generally about issues of museum, heritage, learning and community.