Reflection?

Well, I have been asked to reflect on what I am doing in the DIL. Last night, however, I realised that because I was not carrying out reflection in action I could not reflect on action since I wasn't even recording what my actions were! Consequently, my day yesterday was not quite as effective as it could have been.

I did start working on Wikis and video editing so I will summarise what I remember.

Simon Hart was keen that I look at wikis for the Theatre Studies Programme to use as a way of collaborating between staff since they could post an entry and other staff could edit it and provide feedback thereby having a living document. The other option for these purposes is to have a blog with an RSS feed so staff knew when a change had been made; the changes would be in their face rather than staff having to go and hunt for them. My next step is to set up a wiki to see just how they work from a practical perspective.

I also skulked around the net to see if I could find either wikis or blogs which fostered a community of practice. This was very hard since most of them talk about theatre in general rather than specific forms of theatre - queer theatre was the community of practice with which I was concerned. My thoughts here lead me in the direction of setting up a community site for queer theatre. Although the problem will be buy-in since, for the site to be of any use, the community would need to embrace it fully. Add to this the phenomenon that theatre practitioners have very little time/effort to update a blog or other site this task may be quite difficult.

I then changed my concentration ever so slightly to look at on-line video editors. Why? A practitioner could use them to report/reflect on their work (if they are working in a traditional paradigm); they could be blended with live theatre; they could be used as a digital performance. I am using a web 2.0 directory to find on-line editors to use. So far this has been fruitful but has not been carried out in a co-ordinated fashion. My colleague Allison Brown, Digital Initiatives Librarian, who had the brilliant idea that I compare the different editors I find on a spreadsheet. What a fantastic idea! And, I know, you are thinking it is also so banal but my mind is working slowly these days. So, you can look forward to more...