I have finished the 22 FVRL Discover 2.0 assignments, and this the the 23rd and final. The wrap-up. I heard about this program right after I started work at FVRL and I was very excited. I think it is awesome to work for an organization that values continuing education for all staff. I work behind the scenes, so won't have the immediate gratification of interacting with patrons and explaining/discussing these web 2.0 services, but I will definitely use them in my work. The tool that has been the most useful to me in my work has been Bloglines. I had used it in the past and quit using it, but I have really enjoyed using it again the past few months. There are so many online review blogs and I try to read many of them. It's so much easier with Bloglines to see if there are new posts or not. Also, I have increasingly more friends with personal blogs which they sporadically post on. Now I don't have to check them on a regular basis, I only visit the blogs when I know they've made a new post.
It was nice to look with fresh eyes at some of the technology I use in my personal life, and see how it might apply to libraries. Instant messaging, Flickr, and Youtube are services that I am very familiar with, but their uses in and for libraries are different than my own personal use of them. I visited some sites I probably wouldn't have otherwise, Jacketflap, Twitter, and Tumblr among them.
I think this was a great experience and really appreciate that not only were we encouraged to do this on work time, we are being rewarded for completing the program. So cool! My only suggestions for the program would be to break some of the assignments up. Since I'm not on a public desk, I was able to determine when and for how long I would work on the assignments. Some of them that had several articles and several examples to check out could really eat up time. I like to do things thoroughly, so I would visit each site listed and play with it. The time went by quickly. I think it might be difficult for some branch folks to have enough time to do the reading, visit the sites, AND create a blog post. But maybe I'm wrong. I think the blog format was very clever and enabled participants to actually use a 2.0 technology to discuss what they're learning.
Some things I thought we'd cover but we didn't: Ning, a program the library could use to create their own social network. YAABs and branches could have their own Nings. There are already several libraries on Ning as well as ALA, YALSA, and my library school. But what I really REALLY want to learn about is Second Life, World of War Craft and other online, multi-player games. I'm unlikely to use these on my off time, but I would appreciate some hands-on knowledge of them. So maybe Discover 2.0 could continue and we could get monthly suggestions for new technology to try out? Because, of course, technology is constantly changing and what we learned this year may be obsolete by next year!
