Week 9 Thing 23

At long last, I have arrived at Thing 23 in my journey through MD 23 Things! It has been a long journey but has been meaningful. I have become aware of various 2.0 technologies that I never knew existed and learned how they work and how I can use them. I feel I will be able to help our customers with the new 2.0 technologies.

There were several of the 2.0 tecnologies that I liked discovering. I especially enjoyed the online image generators. Making an avatar was fun and reminded me of playing with paper dolls. I liked using the Library Thing to catalog some of our books at home. I think my husband could benefit from using it to catalog his extensive collection of Titanic books. Sounds like a project for the winter. Maybe he won't end up buying duplicate titles anymore if he has a catalog of what he owns. Shortly after I began the 23 Things, my sister-in-law who is a librarian in a library in Long Island, NY, was visiting and mentioned using the Library Thing to catalog her daughters college books and using tags. Because of the 23 Things I knew exactly what she was talking about. Before the 23 Things I would have been in the dark. I also was glad to find out about Del.icio.us. Now I can access my favorites without having to be on my home computer. Google Docs is another useful find for me. You tube was fun. I now know more about downloadable audiobooks and will be more knowledgeable when customers ask about them at the Information Desk.

Overall I enjoyed learning about the 2.o technologies. But there were some problems that lead to lots of frustrations. Some of the links from the program would not work or the sites had changed and did not look like the tutorials. So I spent lots of time trying to figure them out. Other times the instructions weren't quite right on how to do something and I ended up asking another librarian how to do it. The biggest frustration was that it took longer to go through each week's activities than the 30-60 mintues that we were told. Because of my other jobs at the library, I usually did not have time to do the activities at work and ended up doing most of the 23 Things at home. Sometimes when I did have time to work on it at the library, I could not find a free computer.

Overall, this was an excellent learning experience. I learned a lot that I will be able to use in my job and at home. I had never done an online course before and enjoyed it. I found that I really liked the self pacing aspect. If I had a chance I would do another program like this.