Week 11, Thing 23: the end

#23 Summarize your thoughts about this program on your blog

I guess my favorite thing about this program was that it got me to try a lot of things that I knew I should do, but just hadn't made time for. Now when people talk about blogs, RSS feeds, wikis, and podcasts, I have a clue what they are talking about. Not only that, I actually have a blog, am associated with a few wikis, and even connect with a few other librarians through social bookmarking. And as a bonus, I had a reason for messing around with some fun things and with the excuse that I was doing it for a course! Like creating a Facebook page, which has helped keep me connected to some of my nieces and nephews that live in other states. Not to mention having some lovely chats online with Mara. :-)

What will I take away with me and keep using? Well, I'm going to try using things like wikis and Google Docs to collaborate with colleagues at work and in our professional organization. I may try some things with students, like book blogs. And, partly spurred on by the 23 Things, we are thinking of making Web 2.0 the focus of the VSLA fall conference (of which, frighteningly, I am the co-chair).

Things I have already used for other purposes than just completing tasks for this course:
RSS feeds, wikis, Del.icio.us, Pandora, Facebook.

And things I know I'll keep using:
for work: RSS feeds, wikis, Del.icio.us, Google Docs, probably Library Thing, maybe podcasts;
and for personal use: all of the above (except maybe not Library Thing), plus Pandora & Facebook.

I enjoyed being able to work at my own pace and felt very little guilt about not ever working on any"thing" the same week it was assigned. There were weeks that I was far too busy to even think about working on tasks for the course and other weeks I worked on several of them. For a future offering of the 23 Things it might be good to spread it over a longer time, maybe with two weeks for each of the ten topics, or one week per Thing. That would give people more time to really check out each topic in depth, without feeling rushed. Perhaps you would also want to consider making it available in smaller bites, for those folks who don't want to tackle 23 new things but could maybe manage 5 or 10? Just a thought. I would participate in another of these courses, depending on the topic, if the DOL decided to offer some.

One thing I noticed while I was working through the course was that my obsessive need to try pretty much every link in a lesson sometimes led me to read or watch things that I couldn't make much sense of the first time through. Most of these incomprehensible things became clear if I waited until after exploring the basics of the "thing" in question before attempting to understand the "extras." Perhaps a warning message like, "now go try it out and don't even think about clicking on any of the links below until you feel comfortable with the basics!"

My final comment (ha! like you can really shut me up!): despite the fact that a few people commented that with this online course they missed the face-to-face aspect of sharing learning with others, I have to say that
a) That didn't really bother me, personally;
b) I sometimes went and read what other people blogged about some of the things, especially if I felt like I wasn't getting what was so great about it, and commenting back and forth with people can be a connection if you take advantage of it; and
c) I actually met at least one person face to face that I never would have known if I hadn't participated in this course. (Hi, Rhonda!)

In other words, for me it was a good experience and I learned a lot.