What a journey! or is it a beginning of wonderful lifelong discovery?
I have learned so much in the past few weeks, it reminded me how much I enjoyed and missed learning, especially the new technologies in that wild wild digital world. Of all the web 2.0 technology we learned, libraries are positioned to take advantage of every single one to expand our area of expertise and grow our profession. In reality, HCL has already utilized many to meet our customers and communities in the cyberspace: RSS feeds, tagging, downloadable audio books, desknow and other open source technologies, etc. So my favorites are many, though some of which have similar functions. I certainly will maintain, improve and expand on my current Blog, use tagging and my Del.icio.us social bookmarking tool to share ideas with others, check in on my RSS, using my MP3 player with audio books, podcasts, etc. I could use Rollyo to help someone who has special interest in one subject area. And I believe among all 23 things, Library thing will be most often used among staff for readers' advisory, etc. I will explore the possibility with John, of working with teens in our teen club to make photo albums with Flickr, or podcasting with podcast, or video clips with YouTube. And last but not the least, MERLIN - a local library professional information network, will be an essential tool to help me stay current.
It's overwhelming! The challenge remains to be the same - too little time, too many "things" to do. If there is any disappointment with this training program, it has to be time constraint, especially for me who've really enjoyed the exploring and learning experience. I was fascinated by all sorts of new discoveries and get carried away. Thanks to John - the web-wiz, who came to the rescue many times when I was stuck somewhere along the way. So polling resources, learning from my colleagues, and to separate the irrelevant from resources of real value are vital in handling the amount of information out there - the very same reason that librarianship or it's metamorphosis will sustain. If a similar discovery program is offered in the future, I would definitely participate. But hopefully, we would be given sufficient time to explore. Secondly, even though this is a self learning program which differs from a structured training, some staff would really appreciate more hand-holding at the beginning of each exercise, given everyone is not on the same starting line.
Journey through 23things has been a humbling experience for me - a tech savvy person years ago. I realized how far I've left behind. In today's world, technology advances at the speed of light, people's learning and information gathering behaviors are changing, and the libraries are evolving along with the advances. To stay relevant, we as a profession need to keep learning and discovering. I am thankful that 23 things gave me a chance to catch up and my blog is the jumping board to the fascinating web 2.0/library 2.0 world.
To close this posting, not the "things", you see, I'd like to show you a YouTube video of Jeff Han's multi-touch computer screen first made public in August, 2006. Oh! the wonderful cyberspaces we will go!
This is a latest demo on Perspective Pixel's website made in Jan. 2007.
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