Monday, January 26, 2009

Thing 23: The end but the beginning of everything else

I have very mixed emotions about this being Thing 23 AKA the end of our little journey together. To be honest, in the beginning, I decided to do this mostly for the CE credits. 15 is a lot of credits to go towards my certification! Once I got into it, however, I found myself learning things!

A few things, like Instant Messaging, Flickr, and You Tube I was already pretty familiar with. RSS feeds were one thing I had never used before, and now they are a part of my everyday internet life! I check my gmail and then click on over to Google reader to check various blogs and feeds all in one place! This has cut my internet surfing AT LEAST in half, because all the blogs and websites I used to visit almost daily are all in one place! I also found a lot of new fresh voices in the library internet community through the RSS exercise and Delicious. Intelligent thoughts on libraries and librarianship that make me think and make me proud to be in this profession.

This discovery program also "forced" me to try things I probably never would have used before. I tweeted! I added to a wiki! I was at a library board meeting 2 weeks ago and we were discussing slide show presentations for some reason.... One of our board members said that slide show presentations were so hard to transport from computer to computer because they take up so much space blah, blah, blah.... I told them about SlideShare!

I find myself at a disadvantage to try to incorporate much of what I learned into my daily life at the library. We have such a tight budget and so little techological fortitude (as a library) that bringing us into the 2.0 era will be a challenge. However, after completing this program I now have several ideas for us to establish a presence on the web even if we can't get our own website up and running right away.

I'm not exactly sure how much going through this affected my lifelong learning goals. One thing I know it did was force me to learn new things. It also made me stay on task (at least to a point). I am a chronic procrastinator, so having goals and deadlines helped me to complete this before 11:59 PM on January 29th! I was way behind and enjoyed the challenge of catching myself up.

I was surprised at how much time I spent on some of these exercises. I got the general feeling that some people spent more time on them than others. I know that is what happens with self-paced learning, but I found myself wanting more feedback from other participants on a lot of "things" and was sometimes disappointed in what I found. I am sure people think that about my posts too, so I guess it's just my issue. :)

So as this little journey we have all taken comes to a close, I hope this is not the end. I really enjoyed the feeling of community we created here and I feel like one of the great things about the Web 2.0 movement is there is so much opportunity for interaction, sharing and learning. I want to keep the dialogue going about Web 2.0 and other library related issues. Whether that is though a network of blogs, a wiki, a social network.... I think it could be beneficial to all of us. And any time our illustrious colleagues at the NLC want to put together another discovery exercise like this one, I am totally in. Thanks for all of your hard work guys! I feel like I have earned those 15 CE credits but I learned so much more.

4 comments:

lnorvig said...

Congratulations! I've heard so many great things about 23 Things. This post was a wonderful testimony to the power of that course.

Steve Lawson said...

"I feel like one of the great things about the Web 2.0 movement is there is so much opportunity for interaction, sharing and learning."

I feel that way too, and part of the proof is that I found this blog post because someone else posted a link to FriendFeed pointing me here. One of the challenges of this stuff is that the conversation picks up and moves a lot, and right now, a lot of the chatter is on FriendFeed.

Kathryn said...

I hope you will continue to blog. I have appreciated the insight you provide in your entries.

Kathryn said...

I've enjoyed your blog posts and I hope you keep it up!