To Reflect

Somewhere in downtown Pittsburgh.

I love collecting links to interesting items on the web and I regularly bookmark using Diigo.  While I think that just the act of bookmarking something makes me focus on it a little more than I would if I were just scanning the item and moving on, I'm always feeling slightly guilty about the fact that I don't do much with these bookmarks.  Now that I have a substantive collection, however, I find myself coming to search it more often.  The photo to the right is one I took on a visit to Pittsburgh.  I came upon it today while cleaning up some files and it triggered some cleaning up of my Diigo Library.  Cleaning up, it turns out, is a good way to trigger reflection and in my case this morning, I ended up thinking about my use of tags, the increasingly important role of tagging and folksonomies, and how looking at your own tags and how they related can trigger new connections.  The clean up also forced me to learn a few tricks about searching my own Diigo Library.

Links from my Diigo Library (Tags= reflections, reflective practice, journaling, professional journal, PKM, AAR)

• Fifteen Minutes of...Reflection, Chris Collison - Blog post (2/28/2011)
• The Social Practice of Learning: a craft for the 21st Century - Paper: Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. (2009) 10:205–214. Note: This paper is focused on educators but the broader principles apply to any profession.
• Learning in the Thick of It, Harvard Business Review OnPoint Article, July/August 2005. Note: Focuses on After-Action-Reviews (AARs).
  
  • More AAR links in my Diigo Library

• Donald Schon: Learning, Reflection and Change (infed / Encyclopedia of Informal Education)
• Wikis and Blogs as Reflective Practice (Short Paper)
• More "Reflective practice" links in my Diigo Library. 

• Professional Development Practice: The One Sentence Journal - blog post (June 2008)
• More "Professional Journal" or "journaling" links in my Diigo Library.

If I combine all the related tags mentioned above in a search of my Diigo Library, the query returns... 160 items.  I suspect many of them are labeled PKM for personal knowledge management. 

Related articles

• 7.2 Professional Learning (kijt.wordpress.com)
• "Do I really need to reflect?" (adpu.wordpress.com)
• The Almost Perfect Reflection (Video) 
• My New Year's Resolution: Balancing Solitude and Connectedness (Beth's Blog)