One reason I'm enjoying my AMA

When I was studying for my MA in history at Reading I took advantage of the university's free Microsoft training courses. This was 2004-5. We had had a computer of some sort at home since about 1987. I had written all my undergraduate work on computer, I had worked for a year in admin in an investment bank in Paris and then in an admin office at the university of Leeds. I was already pretty confident with word, PowerPoint, access and excel. Yes, there were aspects of these Reading courses that were deadly boring - "how to open a new document" etc. They also, however, taught me things I had never known about. I learnt about creating contents pages automatically, and about heading styles and section breaks. I still use all these skills today and often find others are as clueless as I was about them.

The point if my story here is that, even though I had some good grounding and experience, there was still a lot more I could learn.

Today I've just started flicking through the Leicester study series book on e-learning in museums. It was produced in 2006 so is quite out of date now and I've been working in museum web/learning environments pretty much since 2006 so I'm fairly well versed in e-learning now. Nevertheless as I flicked through the first few pages I was reminded of those Reading courses. I'm sure there will be little bits and pieces of stuff in the booklet that I haven't thought of before in the same way that the digital learning network conference last week made me remember things I'd forgotten and hear about projects I didn't know about before.

I don't think any of us should ever feel we know everything about our specialism or be too proud or too busy to attend events that might give us that vital refresher. for me, that's what the AMA is all about and it gives you the framework to identify and find time for those learning needs. Anyone who is thinking of doing it but is unsure whether it's the right thing, please get in touch!