Another try at Hello to my classmates
Submitted by nancysmith on Tue, 2007-01-30 19:44.
It has been fun to read the entries posted. It was especially comforting to know that someone else seemed to have some problems posting. I am pleased and excited and scared to be in this group. One of our daughters-in-law recently commented on our oldest grandson (age 7) that he is uncomfortable when he doesn't feel well prepared or think he understands just what's going to happen. That's how I feel about this experience, especially having already tried to post once. We'll see where this attempt goes.
Nancy
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Welcome Nancy! This is a
Welcome Nancy! This is a space where you should feel free to play and, yes, mess up from time to time. It's a learning experience. I don't think any one of us organizers could say that we were totally competent with all of these social tools right out of the starting gate; we've just been doing it longer. You're among friends here, so don't be afraid to experiment. There's a lot to be learned when things go wrong too. :)
And, oh my goodness, two sets of twin boys?!?!? You must have had your hands full! :) If you can handle that, then social software should be a piece of cake.
Stuff breaks. I'm partly a
Stuff breaks. I'm partly a systems librarian, so I break stuff regularly as part of my job. (Right now I'm breaking Subversion source-code control. Go me!) This idea that a technology expert is someone for whom technology always behaves itself and never, ever breaks is completely and utterly bogus.
(Just ask Meredith how often I've broken something on Drupal while we've been getting Five Weeks running!)
The thing to do is not to panic, and to keep going. (Cussing a blue streak under one's breath is permitted, but optional.) So it broke, big deal, stuff just breaks sometimes. Can you get around the breakage? Can you fix the breakage? Can you start over? Can you Google for the breakage and figure out how to fix it? (I'm doing a lot of this today.) Is the tool so irretrievably, idiotically broken that it'd be better to look for a less-broken tool?
If it makes you feel any better, the commonest words out of my mouth after I've figured out how to fix something are "Wow, how incredibly dumb [name of software] is! Who programmed this, a Neanderthal?"
Though I only teach
Though I only teach technology to little kids and their teachers I know exactly what you mean. I think that I learn the most when things don't go right. I really enjoy using all this social software and I think that it will catch on at the library when the staff is trained and felling confortable using it.