LIBR 246-04/13 Web 2.0 (Spring 2010)

1. How has your view of social software changed since starting the course?

Before taking this course I thought learning about social software would be useful only for my future career as librarian or archivist and not much help to me personally.  I now see that social software is vital to work as a librarian and a great way to engage with various communities.  I also found the term social software to be much more encompassing than I had originally thought.  I had already been using RSS feeds and Flickr. This course introduced me to a wide variety of resources.

I also came to see that what I thought were still somewhat marginal applications, like Twitter, are becoming mainstream.  I now feel that one cannot ignore social software as a professional resource and I have expanded my views on how I might use social software personally.

2. What technology did you find most interesting for your personal use? What technology did you think would be most useful professionally?

I really liked using Twitter and found it was a great tool for me both personally and professionally. I like how Twitter highlights important news, blog posts and conference findings that I may never have come across otherwise.   At times it can be overwhelming to navigate any flood of information, and, as Meredith referred to it in her column, Twitter lets you "dip into the stream."

3. What surprised you during the course?

Twitter surprised me the most. I really thought it was a way for teenagers to engage in mindless conversations.  Instead I found intelligent library professionals (among others) who had interesting things to say.  It was incredibly helpful that Meredith provided us with a group of people to follow.

4. What suggestions do you have for improving the learning activities (exercises, assignments, blog posts, readings, examples, etc.)?

I think the exercises and assignments very useful and where great at providing us with hands on experience.  I also liked that for our weekly blogs we were given an assortment of topics to write about.  It helped create a richer dialog than sticking to one topic per week as I have in other classes.

I suppose I should have asked earlier but I wasn't sure how we were graded on our weekly assignments.  Was the grade based only on our blog post or was it on a combination of the post, additional resource and comments?

5. How did your experience using Drupal differ from your experience in Angel classrooms (or classes using other traditional course management systems)?

I found our class discussions to be much more engaging than ones taking place in Angel.  I think the format of Drupal helped. It seemed more intuitive to me and easier to navigate.  Something as simple as see classmates profile photos,  helped create a friendly more inviting atmosphere.  I also like how easy it was to track a particular person's blog posts.

One thing I liked about Angel that is not available using Drupal is the ability to save draft versions of your posts.  I also found it overwhelming at times to sort through all the posts in our Drupal format.  The addition of the weekly tags was helpful but it could still be challenging to locate a post I had read a few weeks prior.  With Angel different weeks discussions were clearly differentiated.  Here they were a bit jumbled.  Perhaps if we had a general tag for the week and a more specific tag for the question chosen it would be easier to browse all the posts for a specific week.

6. Looking back, how would you sum up your experience?

Taking this class was a great experience.  It was a bit more challenging and much more rewarding than I imagined.  I wish I had taken it earlier on in the program instead of near the end because I think it has really has made me a better student.  The enthusiasm and knowledge of Meredith and my fellow classmates has really inspired me.  It makes me excited to become a librarian --knowing that I will be part of such an engaged and dynamic community.