Thing 23: I'M DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I just took some time to look over my past blog posts, while reflecting upon the new skills and knowledge I have acquired. I’m really stunned that I’ve come so far so quickly. It seems like just yesterday that Glynis was trying to convince me to participate in the Web Challenge during a staff forum in Mancini Hall.

Of the internet tools which were totally new to me (Del.icio.us, RSS), I often felt a profound sense of empowerment and insight as I was learning about them, as I was finally finding out what all of my peers had been talking about. As for the other applications and sites with which I had some prior familiarity (Wikis, podcasts), the exercises I was asked to complete helped to reinforce my comprehension.

Among my favorite “things” were Flickr, the Google and Zoho web apps, and the Web 2.0 Awards site. I hope to use Flickr more in the future as I continue to experiment with digital photography, Google Docs and other web apps should be very helpful to me when I go off to grad school in the fall, and I am already fully addicted to Pandora.Com. The only exercises I didn’t enjoy were “Finding Feeds” and Technorati, the former doesn’t seem to be very useful or interesting to me, and the latter seems to have a chronic case of the gremlins. I would definitely recommend that OCL look into implementing some form of Wikis to facilitate staff communication. I highly recommend adding WorldCat to each circulation computer’s list of favorites (or tagging/bookmarking it). Also, a number of web apps seem to have a lot of potential uses in the library system and at individual branches, as I discussed in my post on Thing 18. So far, I have told everyone I know about Pandora, I mentioned Google Docs to my sister and a friend, and I plan to introduce my mother to ListenNJ very soon.

All in all, this was a great experience. Major props to the committee for real.