Task 22 - Thoughts

It's great being given the chance to explore and play with these technologies at work. Looking through the task it's hard to choose a favourite and I have to admit some of the tools have slipped my mind already. Someone mentioned Techonorati the other day and I had to think. So you can see that I'm not making a huge use of Web 2 technologies. But that's the thing with all these tools and technologies - how necessary/useful/timesaving/beneficial.... are they? For the most part and for me and my personal/social life the answer is 'not much'. The thing that probably impressed me the most is how much a lot of these tools and technologies are being used by all kinds of people and I wonder how on earth they find the time to spend on blogs, uploading and tagging photos, adding books to LibraryThing, collating and subscribing to blogs and podcasts and then twittering .... personally I would rather catch up with a friend over a cup of tea and biscuits.

I use RSS feeds and try to log into my feedreader regularly. I would like to have a blog for my liaison work, but that needs some time and thought and I'm not sure what the policy is there. A fellow librarian at QUT has one and the blog address is part of their email signature. I think it would be a good way to present relevant services, resources and tools to the staff and students. I like the ECOB blog and they way they post the 'New books list' on it.

The task instructions and links need to be checked/updated regularly as a few of the tasks were a bit vague, and I've made a few comments in the posts about this. I think the time period could be a little longer - say 12 weeks, minimum, as some tasks take time to explore and some weeks are busier than others. It's important though to make time to do the tasks and to set a regular time aside and be disciplined about this, otherwise it just gets away from you.

This has been a good exercise and a good way to get an overview and some experience of what's out there. 23Things has given me a reason to explore and learn more and that's a good thing and what life-long learning is all about.