Final Thoughts (Exercise #23)

I'm finished one day ahead of the deadline! I was always a bit of a procrastinator in school, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

I really enjoyed doing this program and would love to do something like this again in the future. Considering how quickly things change and how quickly new technologies come out, I'm sure there would be plenty of other things to explore.

I consider myself to be fairly proficient at using technology, so most of the exercises weren't really difficult for me. But the program gave me a chance to explore some different kinds of technologies and products I've wanted to try but just haven't gotten around to actually exploring. For example I had always heard people talk about an RSS feed, but I didn't know what it was. I kept meaning to find out, but then would get sidetracked and would forget about it.

One of my favorite discoveries was the LibraryThing. I'm looking forward to spending a weekend adding all the books I own to LibraryThing. I also really liked playing with some of the generators and some of the applications on Flickr. I was also surprised by how useful del.icio.us seemed after I tried it out. I knew what del.icio.us was before this program, but for some reason I never really thought about trying it out. Now I really like it.

The program gave me a chance to think about how I could use some of these new technologies in my library and in my instruction. I've thought of new ways to improve my wiki subject pages. I'm thinking about how to use things like del.icio.us and podcasts in my instruction sessions. I'm now planning on teaching a workshop in the fall on how to create RSS feeds and use social bookmarks tools to help find and organize information and research. I got the idea from an instruction list-serv that I'm on, but I don't know if I would have been inspired to do my own workshop if I hadn't participated in this program.