If I ever had a life plan (I didn't) - it definitely didn't include building a website. But here I am. The amount of positive feedback I've got from a simple tweet asking for FREE online CPD to share has been overwhelming. So despite my trepidation I am going to try to get this up and running. If you are reading this then you will know that I've started. There is a lot of free stuff out there. This means I have a few problems and I'm not really sure how to manage them.
First of all there is just too much material out there - it can't all be good and I don't want to waste your time with poor quality material. Even more importantly I don't want to provide a platform for anything that's a bit dodgy, ill-informed, not grounded in evidence, or worst of all, downright dangerous. So I have to do a bit of sifting and quality control. In some ways that's fine - I've spent a lot of time doing 'critical appraisal' of research related to psychological therapies. This means I am used to reading things quickly and deciding if they are 'good enough' to inform practice......but, the methods I know so well only help me appraise research and don't apply to appraising online CPD. So I don't have a method of quality control at my finger tips. This means that I'm going to be a bit more cautious than I'd like to be only post things that I feel confident about. So there might be less information here than otherwise, but hopefully what is here will be less likely to be a waste of your time. It will also tend to reflect things I know about already, the people I know, have worked with and trust, and the content that is familiar to me. I hope that over time I'll learn how to appraise online content quickly and get a bit braver at what I highlight. When I do the range of material here might well expand. We'll have to see how that goes.
The second problem, and one I'm more worried about, is the structure of the website. How do I make this all fit into a neat hierarchy so that I can organise the website and help you find what you need as quickly as possible? Our interests are so wide, our needs so varied, and our work is so flexible that it's hard to figure out a roadmap. I've always found it hard to set up a structure for keeping things neat and tidy and as a result I never managed to set up a filing system, either physically or on my computer. So I've had to rely very heavily on the 'search' function to find anything I need. I guess I'll need a search function on this website too.
If you've got any tips I'd love to hear them