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

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

I don't think my general attitude toward social software has changed. I started out considering it useful and even game-changing. It's far easier to network and stay in touch with friends and acquaintances now than it's ever been before. I've fallen out of touch with old college friends and former co-workers that I would have stayed in touch with given today's social software.

I've certainly broadened my experience with social software. I tried online reputation monitoring, started actually using Twitter and integrated it with Facebook, expanded my use of Delicious, tried my hand at screencasting, created wiki pages, and learned a lot about building and promoting online communities. I also have a lot of new blogs to follow and resources to use.

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

Personally, I follow a lot of blogs using RSS, use Twitter and Facebook to stay up to date with family and friends,  participate in some online forum communities, and am migrating my personal bookmarking to Delicious instead of multiple browsers on multiple computers.

Professionally, I expect to use everything we've covered, but especially wikis and social bookmarking tools for sharing information and blogs and forums (or full-blown content management systems like Drupal) for community building. There are a lot of interesting Web 2.0 sites--LibraryThing and Flickr are just a couple--that I'd like to see used as examples for libraries to emulate.

3. What surprised you during the course?

I was surprised by the usefulness of Twitter. It has come in very handy for keeping friends and family up to date on my wife's health issues. I really didn't see much use for Twitter before.

I was also surprised by the shift into the mainstream that Facebook and Twitter made during the course of this semester. I've been receiving Facebook friend requests from less tech-interested, less tech-savvy people than ever before. I've also been noticing references to Twitter everywhere; talk show hosts are talking about Twitter and tweeting themselves. I really think there's more to it than just a greater awareness of Twitter on my part.

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

Not really much I'd change about the learning activities.

I would have liked to have had a standardized tag for all the posts in a given week. So for week 10, in addition to blogpostwk10n1, blogpostwk10n2, resourcewk10, etc., there would have been a wk10 tag. That would have made it easier to find all the posts for a given week.

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

Holding class with Drupal instead of Angel had the feel of getting out of the classroom, like holding class out on the lawn during nice weather. It gave posting a little more of an informal feel.

The Angel interface has a very business-like feel with activity separated into discrete forums corresponding to weekly discussions. Once the weekly discussion is over, class members rarely go back to that week's forum to read or comment. Drupal, on the other hand, makes it easy to track threads you've posted in to see if anyone has posted anything new. This allowed threads to remain active beyond the week of a discussion.

I think the biggest difference was the use of avatars. I think it's easier to associate a poster's voice with an avatar picture than with just a name. I found that I got to know the voices of more of my classmates and know them faster in this class than in my class that used Angel.

I think it's also possible that the kind of people who would take a Web 2.0 class are a little more used to sharing themselves online and a little more willing to express themselves on a personal level.

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

I think I've gotten out of this class exactly what I wanted to get out of it: a broad and hands-on view of how social software can be used in libraries. Along the way, I've been exposed to a lot of new tools and ideas and I've really enjoyed getting to know my classmates. It would have been nice if this had been a less difficult semester for me and I'd had time to read ALL the postings and comment on them more. There were so many interesting threads that I would have liked to participate in.