wrapping it up...

this was a fantastic and successful online offering for a variety of reasons.  One signficant reason is that the creators of the course provided "mulitple learning opportunities"....chatting, listening, watching, practicing, reading....to accomodate multiple learning styles.  Fabulous. Another reason: bleeding edge practitioners were recruited to provide presentations.  A third reason: fantastic participants representing every kind of background, library, and level of exposure to social technologies.  Most significant reason: enthusiastic, supportive, reliable, bleeding edge course facilitators and creators.  Round of applause coming out of Seattle...thanks much.  

 My favorite part--hard to narrow down, but the webcasts felt like the part of the week where most of us were "together" ..the opportunity to watch, listen, and chat simultaneously definitely was new for me and a much richer experience than i thought possible. (so this answers the "unexpected outcomes" piece too!)

Delicious and bloglines have become a critical part of my online life, so much so that it's becoming inconceivable to imagine organizing my time online without them.  So i'd have to say those are hands down the most useful tools we talked about.   And that is both personally and professionally.  I can see the value of wikis and IM software in my library and plan to explore those more.

I should mention that I have spent the past five weeks on this course and on planning my first 3 credit LIB 101 "info resources" course.  Much of what i've learned here I am planning to incorporate into my course.  So, when I teach standard LOC classification, I'm also going to devote time to delicious, tagging, and articles about folksonomies.  (for example).  At this point, I actually feel like it would be irresponsible to expose my students only to the old, and not to the new.  I think they are both important.