Thing 23 Reflection

Some of my more favorite "things" were blogging, facebook, twitter, digg, wikis, utube and podcasts. Not really a good reason other than i guess most of them provided social outlets that are not too personal.
The "things" I enjoyed the least were tagging, RSS feeds, Flicker/Flicker mashups. They just weren't my thing. The others I am pretty indifferent toward.
Challenges I faced primarily was from the frustration relating to me being to get some of the "things" to do what was required on the computer. There was probably a little of both human ignorance to technology and computer errors due to undetermined factors.
I learned a lot from this training. learned what some of the terms meant such as Digg, Twitter, Ning. Many of the terms i had come across in my internet searches but never used because i was unaware of their function.
Some new technology that might be fun to use at our library is blogging. Some of the programs we offer in Youth Services can use blogging to describe what they are and patrons who participate in them opinion of the program. Utube would be fun for storytimes at some point. We just need some of the equipment in order to implement utube.
The teens would probably like to set up a blog, utube and/or podcasts to promote some of their programs especially anime, msnga, and Magic the Gathering.
We are looking for an individual to talk about facebook and myspace to the youth since these are highly used at our library. Many teens pull up or put on inappropriate material and we are wanting to let them be aware that this can have an effect on them in the future in relation to internships, college and employment. Utube and podcasting could act as one avenue to acheiving this end.

Working with youth, many of my patrons are significantly more inept at computer technology than i am and can be quite helpful in creating many of the technologies used in the 23 things program. Many of the things relate or build on each other or showed me a different way of reaching a similar goal eg. utube/podcasting or myspace/facebook.

At first, I really did not look forward to the training because learning these new technologies was way out of my comfort level. My first blogs reflected frustration, but as I became more comfortable my frustration dissipated significantly. I am still not completely comfortable with all of the technologies I learned about, but as I use them more and more my comfort level will continue to increase.

The training although challenging at times has and will open up opportunities for me in the future. I even was able to teach my spouse about one of the technologies and he throughtly enjoys computer technology and is pretty aware of the "things" out there.