What were your favorite discoveries or activities over the past ten weeks?
RSS Feeds, Google Reader and subscribing to different feeds/podcasts, playing with the different Wiki's and how podcasts work. I also enjoy the iGoogle feature where you can see everything on a page when you log on to a computer if you choose to. (have set this on my home computer as my home page now.)
Do you feel more confidence with these resources now? Was it time well-spent?
YES. Completely. Totally. I am very comfortable with tech stuff, but because I haven't had an actual need to use some of the things we learned about, I had not played with some of the things we learned about before. This showed me both how I can use these in my personal and professional life as well as showing our patrons. I do much better when I have a 'task' to complete. I have always tried to dig around on the research tools and such, but since I didn't have a real 'question' in mind, it was hard to figure out how to use the actual tool very well. I'd look, try to come up with a question, was unable since I didn't have a good background in that particular subject, so I'd just look around and say to myself "well, I looked at it..." This was awesome that we had specific tasks to complete
If a similar learning program is offered in the future, are there other resources and technologies you would like to see covered? Any suggestions for how we might run the program differently?
At this point, I am not aware of any resources or technologies that I didn't see covered. I'm sure they are out there since I'm not in the 'know' of the latest, greatest technology fads. I'd love to see the 23 Things continue for those who want to participate in continuing to learn new things. And I think the program worked very smoothly .... at least from this end it did. I see now how you guys kept up with all of the blogs and such. At first, I didn't see how that was happening until the Google Reader lesson came up and I saw that the people I was following on my blogger.com account came up in the google reader as well in a very nice list of how many blogs this person had produced since the last time I had looked. I decided that I was going to follow all of my staff here at Fairdale just so I could see their thoughts on what they were learning each session to see if it gave me any other insights into what we did that week as well. And, it was a good way to keep up with who had finished what posts!!
Do you think our patrons would benefit from a similar program?
Hmmm... if they would come for the training, sure. Most people I see come in for the "OMG, I have to find 10 articles on Basket Weaving RIGHT NOW. Can you help me??!!" Not many people come in anticipation of having that research assignment someday where they will need to have these skills.
It's a safe bet that most people who are on the internet regularly see the interest in the social networking websites. If we offered training for adults on how to use and set up these accounts I'd bet that would be popular. This would be beneficial just for showing them how to secure their information to ONLY those people they want to be able to see that information.
I'll bet most people don't know the coolness of Google Reader and RSS feeds, but not sure if anyone would show up for training since its hard to explain how cool it is until you see it. It's such a huge timesaver and it's in a nice, easy to see updates, easy to use format.
I'd think that the people who would most benefit are those that are around my own age... mid 30's early 40's who are comfortable with tech, but maybe don't keep up with the cool things that are happening. They have jobs and lives but want to learn a little bit more about new things available out there on the internet. The college students writing those papers don't have time, the high school/middle school/elementary school students already know most of it, and I think it would be too much for a lot of the senior users to comprehend. (Not all.. I have met some very tech savvy seniors)
