One of my favorite experiences was the weekly chat session.  My group was really diverse and it was great to pull on each person's experiences during the weekly chats.  It made much of the material in the screencasts and readings really come to life.  Of all of the technologies we covered, I cannot think of a single one that wouldn't be good for me personally.  I have a blog currently and I want to explore wikis and RSS feeds and so on.  I find all of this really stimulating.  On a professional level, at least to begin with, blogs and wikis are the most useful tools.  For me, they are the easiest to implement and explain to my users- both faculty and students.  I do believe that many of my folks are already tuned into feeds and other things like social bookmarking on their own.

I really liked the screencast called "Library 2.0? No, Thank you!"  Many of the obstacles they pointed out are my obstacles, and I think they presented very creative workarounds for the problems.  I can really relate to technical obstacles since I don't control the web server and have to beg the lone IT guy we have to make any changes.  At least he is open to open source software!

After the screencast, I was encouraged to try many of the things I learned in this class including starting a blog for my faculty and redoing our library website.  I am also exploring the whole social networking concept as I look to mounting digital collections on the library website.  What can I carry over from places like Second Life that will work to put gallery talks together?  I found it very helpful to have many ideas to draw on as I plot the digital future of my library.

I really liked the presentation from Czarnecki and Gullett on Second Life because it made me once again think of the vast number of applications I might be able to take advantage of.   Since I have my own Second Life avatar, I am somewhat familiar with cruising around in Second Life, and I like the idea of using it with my students.  My students as second career folks don't have a lot of time for this kind of stuff, but I think they need to be exposed to it in order to keep up with where many of their congregations are.  Plus, some of my doctoral students will have their own students some day soon who are going to be very aware of the technology.  So, the presentation really spoke to me about the potential for use and where all of this may take librarians some day.

Now that the class is drawing to a close, I am excited about the new possibilities that blogging offers me.  I have already started a new blog for my faculty and I think for the time being, blogs are a great way tool for outreach and communication.  Further, I would like more of my faculty to launch blogs of their own so maybe it's time to do a faculty workshop on blogging for academics.