My favorite things

You may never again hear a student of any kind say this, but my favorite part of the course was the homework (a.k.a. activities). Without the expectation of producing something every week, it would have been very easy to put everything else off with good intentions of catching up later but never getting around to it. There's no replacement for getting in there and getting your hands dirty, and it provides a point of reference for everything else.

The "everything else" was wonderful too. The readings, the screencasts, the presentations were all practical and interesting. (My one suggestion on the screencasts was to indicate how long they are so we know how much time to plan for them). The chats were a great way to connect with other colleagues, and I'm looking forward to keeping that up in some way. I love my colleagues at my institution (well, most of them...), but it's really refreshing to step outside of our little world here and talk to others. You can do that to some extent at conferences (when you have the time and money to go), but that opportunity is rare, and it's harder to make connections at conferences, I think. You have too many social conventions getting in the way. You can't just walk up to a complete stranger and start sharing ideas about a particular project (well, you can, I guess).

Personal use? I've already found personal uses for flickr for posting photos of community events. I can see all kinds of potential for other volunteer organizations I'm involved with too. The technologies seem perfect for those situations, where a lot of people have information to share, but nowhere to do it. I maintain a neighborhood website, but how much better to use a wiki and/or blog to let everyone in the neighborhood contribute so things don't have to be filtered through me!

Professional use? I really got excited about the RSS feed applications. I thought I knew what RSS was, but what I knew was so very limited. I'm excited about the possible uses here of sending information to where our students are.

Unexpected outcomes? I'm surprised that learning about the technologies has caused me to experience a renewed sense of control over content (ironically). We hear about how you have to give up control over content, but my experience has been quite the opposite in a way. We recently restricted access to our website so that only one or two people can edit it and all changes go through a committee. This makes it pretty cumbersome to make changes or to provide dynamic content. Social networking software offers a new sense of control in creating content. Maybe control isn't the right word. Maybe it's more like empowerment.

Final comments? Thank you so much to all of the organizers, presenters and participants. I've said this before and I'll say it again. This 5 weeks has been one of the most invigorating and energizing professional development activities I've engaged in in 20 years of being a librarian. I've discovered an entire sphere of activity and conversation and interaction going on in the library world that I knew nothing about. Some of this may be generational, I don't know. I appreciate having had the opportunity to participate and I look forward to spreading the word among my colleagues. I expect to refer to the course site a lot; it's an amazing toolbox. I've posted it to del.icio.us (a sentence that 5 weeks ago would have meant nothing to me).