My reflections.
This has been a helpful exercise for me. Though, in the last couple of years, I have dabbled in most of the exercises that were required, I'd not actually spent a lot of time using many of them. I've found some helpful tools along the way.
Del.icio.us is one of the ones that I am finding helpful. It used to drive me nuts having to send URLs to myself at home when I knew I'd want access to it there, and vice-versa. While I was at the leadership conference last week, I used zoho.com to create a document being shared by several people in my work group. It was nice to be able to access the document from any computer without having to carry around a thumb drive or get back to the laptop to send the document to someone else.
I learned several of the things I did because I was willing to take the extra time to figure out work-arounds. YouTube was one of those. Dumping YT videos into some blogs is as easy as a couple of clicks of the mouse but that hasn't been set up for TypePad. I just couldn't believe that with TypePad being a very popular blogging program, that there wasn't a way. There WAS a way! I just had to care enough to make it work.
Whether we like it or not (and I certainly do), technology is becoming more and more sophisticated and a part of our lives every day. I've said it before, but I feel strongly that anyone who is going to work in a library these days must have, at least, a cursory understanding of what's out there and how to use it. Some of it is crazy and silly and probably won't be around for long, but much of it is changing our lives and making it much easier to share information. That's what we're about. Sharing information. If you don't believe that, you shouldn't be here.
The only thing I think I would do differently if this program was to be done again would be to encourage people not to try to do it all in a couple of weeks. I got to the point where I felt like I really couldn't spend any more work time on this project, as exciting as I found it to be. Maybe spread it out. Dole it out in pieces. That's more work for the people administering it, but I think it would have made it easier for some to do a piece and put it away.
I'd probably participate if another program like this was offered that had new information for me to learn. It's definitely worth it.
