The 23rd Thing - Reflections about Learning 2.0

I learned about Gabcast from another PLCMC Learning 2.0 participant and decided to try it. Thank you Questing Librarian. You can listen or read this post.




It feels good to enter this last post but at the same time I can say I'm going to miss doing the exercises. I do know that I will go back to spend more time learning and exploring the different sites, especially my favorites. I added Learning 2.0 as one of my feeds in my Bloglines account.

I want to thank all those who made this Learning experience possible. I hope I get to talk to you personally to tell you how exciting it was to go through the program. I appreciate the many hours that were put into it. I hope there will be more opportunities like this in the future. I had some help along the way; at work I got together with coworkers Cassandra, Amy and Trilby. Thanks for your insights, tips and for being there when I had questions. My son Kevin also helped and my daughter Andrea was always ready to encourage me and it was neat to get comments from her and some of her fellow bloggers.

I enjoyed almost every exercise; some were more challenging, and I spent quite some time reading the tutorials. Among my favorite sites: del.icio.us, Flickr, Bloglines,Rollyo, LibraryThing, ZohoWriter, YouTube and Writely. I will definitely go back to these sites to take advantage of all they have to offer. Each one is unique and offer powerful features and tools.

As I said I spent hours looking through the different websites, studying, reading, etc...I would not have been able to make the progress I made if I had tried to do the exercises at work. Just the reading alone took quite some time and this was all new material to me. Some people chose not to participate because the amount of work to do became overwhelming. Perhaps fewer exercises should have been assigned with different levels of complexity. I do hope that in the future training based on all these exercises will be offered. It's truly being an exciting experience that all should be given the opportunity to discover. I believe it is possible for someone to learn on their own, but some concepts are not so easily assimilated or understood.

So when do we continue with thing 24. Just kidding; I do need a break. I have to catch up with my knitting.

NetLibrary

The tutorial created by Mary Kyle made it very easy to create my NetLibrary account. One of my favorite authors is Francine Rivers so I chose "And the Shofar Blew" for my first title. I don't have an MP-3 player yet so I downloaded the eBook radio quality to my computer. Following Mary's instructions it should be simple to download it to the portable device.

Podcasts

For this exercise I chose the Yahoo Podcast directory to locate AudioFile. This site is all about audio books which can be downloaded as an MP3 player file. I'm looking forward to learning next all about these neat players.

I listened to three sound reviews: The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Firefly Cloak by Sheri Reynolds and Night by Elie Wiesel.

My You Tube Selection - The Last Knit

The video I selected for my post is from Annekeanna, a YouTube member since 3 months ago. She lives in Jerusalem and already has 323 subscribers. To post this video on my blog I highlighted and copied the embed code which can be found in the box next to the video screen. I opened a new post in my blog and clicked on the insert link icon to paste the code.

In my opinion this site could be used to document programs or special staff ocassions which take place in the library.

Judy's Book - A Web 2.0 Tool

Judy's Book is a website which was rated second in the Classifieds and Business Category. It's a fairly new site made up of members from all throughout the United States and the amount of information which can be obtained in it varies from city to city. For instance smaller towns have less members so I did not find as much information.

This site would be useful for a newcomer who is looking for general information about the area. The site offers local information about businesses, restaurants, salons, music.,etc... I think it's neat that the restaurant reviews are written by people living in the area. There is a place for sharing your own opinion/comment about the review. As I said I think that due to the fact that it is a new site, I only found two reviews about Mexican restaurants in the Charlotte area. Maybe I'll join and express my opinion about one of my favorite restaurants "Azteca".

Judy's Book allows members to meet other members and they can share their experiences, questions about any given topic, favorite doctors, restaurants, businesses, etc... in the blog feature.