Realising You Need to Revisit Past Work
As part of my Masters submissions, I was required to develop a way of hosting some of my work; by preference a website. This was a fantastic introduction to developing an initial sense of sharing work with the public, while targeting a specific academic audience. One of the problems though was that I developed the website as an assignment piece, submitted the link, and for a while, did not think of it again. Not all the work was there. As time went on, I completed the Masters, and gradually forgot about the work that was not easily accessible and not on the website; I even forgot for a while that I HAD a website, that was still gathering dust in a forgotten corner of the internet.
As I involved myself in new innovations on a work-related basis, I was often asked questions about past pieces, and I began to realise that I wanted to be able to direct people to them. Not only that, it was really difficult to do; for one thing, I had to search my own emails each time to find draft submissions I had made so that I could track down my own links. Why are these not all on a single website location, I started to think? Before realising that many of them were. I resurrected the link to my own website, and really looked at it. It was still interesting, even a year or two later, and the work that could be added to it would make it more interesting still. I started adding the link to all my profile pieces, along with the link to my online dissertation. The problem then was that it was all so messy.
Driving forward several years from this point, I did of course eventually become medically retired, at which point my work related credentials vanished, along with some of the work I had hosted on the internet professionally. I therefore amalgamated all my work holistically into one portfolio, accessible even from the blog you are presently reading. The process of engaging in a reflective practice is that you really start seeing what you are doing wrong (blast that reflection and time out for causing extra workload...), and one of the issues I know that I will have is the continual updating of a core set of work I have already produced, because I feel that research may one day be useful for the student community.
