#23 Made it!

Well this little Moomintroll is happy to sit back and contemplate for a while.
I can't honestly say it has all been "play" but I have enjoyed learning new things and looking at my fellow participants' blogs. And I do feel a sense of achievement in completing all the tasks.

I am certainly more comfortable around things like flickr, mash-ups, wikis, podcasts and the like. Some things I'll probably use, others I suspect will fall by the wayside because they just don't match my needs and time at the moment. I'm likely to be a continuing dabbler in bloglines, del.icio.us and (maybe) rollyo because they are quick and easy to use and present me with new and interesting discoveries.

Professionally, Learning 2.0 has brought me up to speed (well nearly) with things we librarians will need to know to be able to keep pace with our patrons' needs and interests. I don't have the technical knowledge or authority to make things happen but at least I now have some of the broad concepts and jargon required to converse with those who do have them.
A few practical observations:

• Time and access are issues. I completed most of this course at home in my own time using my own computer. My family got grumpy about it sometimes and so did I. It takes a lot of time (and concentration late at night) to learn and use new things.
• I think it would be preferable for a group of us to do it together at work at a set time each week (it would take much longer though).
• Having 2 or 3 distinct "things" to complete in a week got a bit daunting sometimes.
• I couldn't get several of the podcasts to work (my computer no doubt). And I had some other technical difficulties which added to the workload (I spent ages trying to get my whole heading picture back with no success).
• A number of my colleagues were fed up with having to blog about what they discovered and felt quite rightly that it went against the ethos of blogging. Is there some other way of showing that you are completing the course? (Being a goody-goody I ended up doing everything and dutifully blogging about it).
• Would it be possible to have a compulsory overview of the "things" and then a set of topics and tasks from which to choose to go into at more depth (then you're not spending time on things which don't really interest you)?
• Maybe people from each library service could nominate someone from their group for a prize: we might be more able to identify the heroes who have kept on going against the odds (for some people getting a blog going at all has been a huge achievement).

Finally, THANK YOU (and I mean this) to the organisers - a huge undertaking tackled with expertise, enthusiasm and good will.