Author: Elizabeth Budd
As I near the end of my second term as a DHA, it is a good time to reflect on what I’ve learned from this experience so far. Since starting in September, I have learned, been exposed to, and experimented with a number of digital tools. Although the major tool I have been using in my work is ArcGIS, being part of the DHA team and Team Workhouse means that I learn more every week from the work other team members have been doing. However, perhaps more importantly than learning digital tools, I have learned the importance of communication and asking questions.
For teams like the DHAs and Team Workhouse, communication is crucial. Just like the game objects in Bard’s Unity project that needed to share information in order to function, people on teams also need to share information in order to function smoothly. Uncertainty about who is doing what is not efficient or productive for teams. A particularly important part of communication is asking questions. While I have learned a lot about digital tools these last two terms, I know that there is a lot that I still don’t know. While sometimes it can be productive to struggle through uncertainty to figure something out, other times the process can be greatly improved by a quick meeting or email exchange.
One example of this was when I was helping to migrate our website to a new page (you can see our current website here!). In particular, I was struggling with moving media (especially videos) over to the new site. I spent time looking through Reason’s documentation and trying to figure it out myself, but made very little progress on my problem. Finally, I talked to Doug Bratland, Web Content Specialist, part of Carleton’s Web Services Group. He was incredibly helpful and in just a half hour was able to fix the problems I had been working on. Not only did he solve the problems I was having, but he also took time to explain why I had been running into problems and make sure that I understood what he did to solve them. I came away from that meeting with not just solutions to the website issues, but also a deeper understanding of how Reason CMS works. If I had not asked for help and questions about the problems I had with the website, not only would it have taken much longer to fix, but I wouldn’t have learned as much about how it works. Although just one example from my two terms as a DHA, it nevertheless illustrates the importance of asking questions about things I don’t know. And although I have learned a lot about digital tools in the past two terms, there is still a lot I don’t know. So, I will need to keep asking questions.
