Thing 13 - Summary

Some of my favorite things from this course were the Library 2.0 week and the Online Apps/Tools week. For Library 2.0, this was a term I'd heard but never really felt comfortable with. Now I do, and although I still don't think the term is a good representation of the concept, I do like what it stands for. For the Online Apps/Tools week, I had used Google Docs previously and am comfortable with it. But since I had to use a second tool for the exercise, I also looked at Zoho. I discovered I really liked it. I'm sure I'll keep using Google Docs but I did enjoy learning about Zoho and seeing how it worked too. I didn't think that I would like Zoho, so I was pleasantly surprised. Additionally, I was reminded that week how useful these online collaboration tools are when working on documents with others.

This course did help me feel more comfortable with technology. I've taken other courses like this, for Web 2.0 tools. But every time I take new course there is always something new and different that I learn. Sometimes the tools have been improved since I last used them, so taking these kinds of discovery courses helps me keep up to date. One area I definitely feel more comfortable with is blogging. We had to use our blog for a number of different tasks throughout the course and so I definitely feel more comfortable using blog software and leaving comments on other people's blogs.

My unexpected outcome was that I enjoyed following the blogs of some of my friends. I started following them and in Blogger would see their updates when I logged in to Blogger. Since we were often working on the same week's tasks, I would read their posts and add comments. This was something I have rarely done before.

I don't have any suggestions on improving the format, or things that were left out. As usual, time is always an issue so I was very happy that you are giving us until Jan 2 to complete the course and evaluation. My only minor suggestion would be to offer a course that lasted a shorter time. That would give me less of a chance to fall behind. ;-)

I would definitely participate in future discovery projects that the RML might offer! Thank you!