What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
I thought that Google Docs, learning about podcasts, and getting familiar with RSS feeds were the three most interesting and useful things I learned from this program. Since I was familiar with about half the technology we explored in this program already, I'm not including anything I understood before, so these would be counted among the best new discoveries I found along my 2.0 Journey.
How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
It taught me that I'm very good at learning things when someone sets timelines and structures for me to follow. When I'm self-learning, I kind of wander around aimlessly and never get anything accomplished, but with a simple set of guidelines, I'm too OCD not to follow them in a timely fashion. Perhaps I should go back and really try to work on that element that I thought would be hardest for me in the beginning: setting goals ahead of time. If I could learn to do it for myself, I'd be a much more efficient learner.
Were there any take-aways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
It did expose me to a lot of technology I wasn't familiar with before, and as a librarian, I definitely think it's important to have an idea of what's out there that our patrons might be using. Even if we don't use all of these technologies on a daily basis, we have a duty to know what they are, what they're about, and basically how they work so that we can be useful and current resources for the folks who come into the library.
What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
I don't know if it's possible, but the number of accounts we had to create for this program was a little daunting. Personally, having grown up in the age of the internet, I'm a bit wary about what's out there about me floating around on the net that can be tracked down with people who have a knack for using Google to their advantage. It's hard to keep track of all the places you leave your digital fingerprints when you have a billion accounts all over the place, and I was a little frustrated to have so many logins and pages and registers created that I know I might not ever use again and will just sit there uselessly in cyberspace for someone to stumble upon.
If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you again chose to participate?
Sure, if for no other reason than to have someone point out new technologies I might not be aware of but should.
How would you describe your learning experience in a few words or a few sentences, so we can share our successes and promote this program?
For those of us who are already familiar with computers, 23 Things is a great program to turn our basic knowledge into something much more in-depth and useful for our patrons. It's a big internet out there, and even librarians can use a helping hand finding the latest and greatest tools available.
And now for some personal thoughts...
Throughout the program, I found myself getting kind of grumpy because according to my co-workers, even though I'm young, I'm still an old-fashioned matronly librarian at heart. I've grown up in the technology age, and I like it fine when I need it to do something. However, I do not think that the world should exist solely online. I think there's something to be said for handwritten letters and big, thick leatherbound volumes and music played on vinyl and meeting people the usual way - face-to-face instead of as pixels on a screen. I don't understand why people think that technology should replace the real world. It seems like a dangerous thing we're doing here, replacing everything with its computerized counterpart. I'm all for time-saving tools and technology that does things no human ever could, but when co-workers are emailing back and forth from ten feet away instead of talking, and when I read articles about how we should have "paperless libraries" or see people spending more time and effort (not to mention money) on second lives instead of their first ones...I wonder what all this technology is doing TO us while it's doing things FOR us. Halfway through 23 Things, I found myself despising technology and all the stupid little doohickeys and doodads and trinkets that people make, and I wondered why these people didn't have anything better to do with their time. If I used all the technology we learned about just in this short, by-no-means-inclusive program every day, I would never move out from in front of my computer screen.
Now, I don't mean to sound like a hypocrite. When my internet goes down, I get heart palpitations and start panicking and texting people to let them know why I suddenly disappeared in the middle of a conversation or why I won't be back online for a while. But at the same time, I know when it's time to go lie in my hammock and listen to the waterfall in our pond and daydream for a while. It reminds me of that old saying, "The things you own end up owning you." In this case, the tools we use end up using us. Are we masters of our technological domain or its slaves? It's hard to tell sometimes.
Probably the huge influx of technology every week made me have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction where I wanted to turn off my computer for a week and go live in a cabin a la Walden, but overall, I think we can make good use of technology in libraries and in our lives. As long as I spend more time away from a screen a day than I do in front of it, it's all good.
Thanks, 23 Things, for teaching me new things and also helping to give me a bit of much-needed perspective.
