In the rural north east of Scotland working with school
library colleagues is a delight, a great chance to meet, discuss, share ideas
etc. But the rural nature itself can make the physical act of meeting up a bit
of a trial – even arranging a meeting can be lengthy process. Our next meeting –
now set for 19th March, was the result of at over 27 emails over two
days which got mixed up with a training day date too. Perhaps there are simpler
ways of doing things and Doodle has stood out as a potentially useful tool to
aid in the arrangement of meetings, and one I shall be looking to trial to arrange
the next meeting!
When reflecting on recent group meeting a and collaborative
working, one in particular jumps out at me, an application for school library
improvement funding which a group of us had volunteered/ been volunteered to
undertake. Time was limited with only 4 weeks to get this completed – two of
which covered the October break. After exchanges ideas, suggestions and
comments by email it became clear we would need to meet up over the holidays to
progress this work to the application form level. This we did in a café with
no internet access (!) so were unable to contact folks who didn’t show. Thank
goodness for print copies of work. We spoke, argued, discussed and decided
another meeting was needed which duly took place a week later in one of our
libraries. Application form completion was then delegated to one of our group
members, who during completion process sent out copies for comments on drafts.
The whole process was a very time heavy affair with a lot of face to face
meetings which I’m not sure provided for me a most positive experience. Email and occasionally messenger were about
as advanced as our networking got, and partly due to events taking place during
part of my annual leave I did get frustrated about giving up my time for
lengthy meetings which didn’t always achieve as much as hoped for. Having
investigated some of these online collaborative tools I think I would have
looked at using a few of these to have a virtual meeting. As part of our
physical meeting was to collate and discuss ideas, there is no reason why this
could not have been completed on a platform like Slack, especially with its
ability to share files. That it creates an archive of the meeting means others
can look at the discussion and you’ve able to go back and extract missed ideas
and links. Also for seeking peoples
comments and feedback on the application form, this could have been an online
google document, where everyone could pop on look and comment, make changes
etc. A recent need to collate evidence
would have befitted from this form of tool too rather than endless emails. I
personally am quite taken by Trello being a list kind of person. I like the
idea of a visual to do list so it clearly shows how people are getting on with
tasks – though some may object to their lack progress being evident! These collaborative
tools have made me think about including one or two as part of my repertoire of
meeting tools, but I will need to check with IT if they will allow use of them
on our network, are those involved happy to use that home if needs be (meeting
during holidays) and will people use them. You can have all the fantastic collaborative
tools at your disposal, but if people choose not to use them or not to do the
work for a meeting in the first place then they are of little help.
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