Thing 30 - Summary

Well, all done, here we are at the last “thing”, and what a relief!

I think what surprised me most about this program was how excited some people got over learning some of the tasks. They had never previously had exposure to some of the things we covered and were pretty into doing the exercises. It was good to see that.

I think the biggest change that I would suggest would be to distribute the more “fun” exercises a little more evenly throughout the program, and not have them clumped together at the end. Many of the exercises at the beginning were, quite frankly, boring and it would have helped to have something fun to do along the way.

My other main suggestion would be to not have so many “things.” We have so much to do in the course of a day or week, that this added work was difficult to manage. Yes, it got done but it was at the expense of other things.

Oh, I thought of one other thing! Please, please, please do not set up the spreadsheet system again. That was extremely painful. If you absolutely feel you have to set things up that way, at least divide it into maybe 5 different spreadsheet...one for numbers 1 - 50, 51-100, 101-150, etc. It was terribly time consuming trying to even get into it!

I suppose my participation in future discovery programs might depend on what the topic was. Of course my supervisor might require my participation, so it might not even be my decision! Online learning, while it might be the wave of the future, is not my preferred method. I know my learning style and preferences, and online just doesn’t adequately meet my needs.

Thing 29 - My Learning 2.0 Experience

Let’s see…I really liked Library Thing although I was already familiar with it. The image generators were lots of fun. Podcasts and youtube, not so much for me – maybe if I was creating them, I’d like them better? And the social networking sites are definitely not for me at this point, but it was nice to check them out a little bit.

This program did not affect or assist my lifelong learning goals to a great extent. I’m an avid learner on my own and I’m currently in school, so lots of learning going on in addition to, or in spite of, this program.

Thing 28 - Rollyo

This was pretty interesting. I didn’t choose to create my own since I’d like to learn a bit more about the tool and decide if it is of value to me before I set anything up. I do think there could be some really good uses for Rollyo – it could be a good tool to group together various sites that have good reading lists or certain databases that you use frequently. For some reason I see it of being more value to a school media specialist than I do for a public library, but maybe I haven’t given it enough thought!

Thing 27 - Library Thing

This was an easy assignment! I already had a Library Thing account and a number of books added. Actually I had to create the account for one of my classes at school.

I hope to continue using it as a way to track the books I’ve read, adding tags that are meaningful for me. This will be so helpful from a reader’s advisory standpoint. So many times I know just the perfect book to suggest to a customer, but for the life of me, can’t remember the title or author. I think using Library Thing in this manner will be so helpful.

I’ve changed my account over to private rather than public, so am not listing my link. But if you look at my blog, I added a widget to pull random books from my Library Thing library!

Thing 26 - Online image generators

These were so much fun! I really liked the one you supplied us, bighugelabs. I especially liked the Warholizer, the Framer, and even the Palette Generator (I can see this one as a real aid in decorating!).

Above is a picture of some flowers that I sent through the Warholizer!

There is one other one not listed on our thing page that I like. It is dumpr. Sounds kind of gross but one of their options takes your photo and turns it into a sketch! Very cool!

Thing 25 – Summary of podcasts and video

I really liked Denver Public Library’s use of podcasts to read some stories to children. What a fun option! Yet, given the choice I think it’s more important to read aloud and in person to a child and not stick them in front of a computer. Maybe these would be good for long trips – load them on to an MP3 player and you’re off!

I also looked at The Library Channel by Arizona State University. There was a good teaching opportunity with a podcast on how to do research online. As an occasional-use type of thing, this could be fun and useful. I don’t believe I’d enjoy the delivery on a regular basis, like in a weekly class.

Thing 24 - Podcasts

I listen to some podcasts at home and so have some familiarity with them. But for some reason, when I did this exercise, I kept running across things which had lots of advertising – audio advertising! Not fun…and I couldn’t seem to find a way around it.

That said, it was hard to get excited about this exercise. Doing it here at work, with our ridiculously slow response times, made some of the podcasts very choppy and difficult to listen to. I didn’t plow through very many.

I didn’t add anything new to my Google Reader account…I already have RSS feeds in there for things I like and didn’t find a new one that during this exercise that I liked enough to add!

Thing 23 - YouTube

I had a hard time finding things I wanted to watch. As with any public site, there is a lot of junk out there and sifting through it can take a lot of time.

I finally found some Neil Diamond videos that I loved! I’m a big fan of his and have always regretted that I’ve never seen him live. So seeing some of the videos of his live performances was really fun! I selected one that had really good sound quality (some were quite poor in that regard) and hope you enjoy it! Here it is!