On feeling overwhelmed
Submitted by dsalo on Sun, 2007-02-25 23:38.
I've seen a lot of posts in the last few days with a worried "feeling overwhelmed" feel to them.
Relax, folks. There's no tests here, no grades, no scary boss evaluations. We the Organizers, all we care about is that you take full advantage of the opportunities we've pulled together, that you experiment and ask questions and make mistakes and figure out how to fix them and just generally learn things. And many of you are doing far more than we'd expected or even hoped!
(We do worry that a few of you are missing opportunities, and we will probably be saying more about that early in week 3. But for the most part, it's all good!)
I'd like everybody who's been feeling overwhelmed to turn that feeling around: consider what you've learned in two short weeks, and then consider that every single one of us organizers has spent months or even years trying to bring colleagues and coworkers to the place you've reached. You have leapfrogged a considerable chunk of the profession. Be proud of that!
Also, remember that when you return to your libraries, your consortia, and your patrons, you will run into people who feel just as overwhelmed as you do now. Be kind to them, and also be strategic in your approaches, as we'll discuss in later weeks. As we put this course together, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to make it fun and enticing as well as informative, how to get across the maximum volume of information with minimum stress. I'm not entirely sure how well we're doing, and I shan't be surprised if future workshops on the Five Weeks/Learning 2.0 model improve on our performance -- but we tried, because it's important not to snow people under.
Finally... one of my favorite work sayings is "Nobody's born knowing this stuff." I wasn't. Meredith wasn't. None of us was. Apologizing for ignorance is unnecessary, especially when you're busy remedying it! Moreover, we're all learning. There's eleventy-dozen things I can't do with (or to!) computers that I wish I could. I'm not a guru atop the knowledge-peak; I'm just at a different place on the mountain, climbing just like everybody else.
So, deep breath everybody, and let's have a great Week 3!
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Just to add to Dorothea's
Just to add to Dorothea's excellent post, keep in mind that you will have plenty of time after the course to look back on these materials. The materials will stay up here online after the course ends, so you can reference them later on. So if there is something you haven't gotten to study/try as much as you'd like to now, you can always come back to it later after the course is over.
I recently did a blog post
I recently did a blog post titled "Four years to a social library." It takes a significant amount of time to absorb, understand, and use all this stuff. You won't feel comfortable with everything right now. I'd think that when you are done, you might pick one or two of these technologies that you think might really work for you and explore that in depth.