LIS 9763

I use to think of social software and gaming as something that young people engaged in to pass their time. I now think of it as a way to form groups, community and to enhance learning and ideas.  My favourite tools are blogging, delicious and YouTube. I enjoy blogging because you can post ideas, thoughts and it sometimes feels like you are writing in a diary. I also like the fact that when I am writing on a blog I can easily add a link so that when I am referring to something I do not have to elaborate to the point where it confuses my audience. I can later check back and see what others have replied.  Blogging can also be a great tool for libraries.  This can be incorporated in bookclub discussions, teen pages and other creative ideas.  I really enjoy using delicious, because tagging seems to be the greatest feature to create your own virtual information source. Through the readings in this course I have also seen how several libraries have used this on their websites to add information for users. It is a great way of not crowding a website and having one link and once you click on it, you are lead to a wealth of information! A tag cloud is another great feature, which we used in our group project. I feel this is similar to a keyword search where a user can select some words and locate relevant sources of information.
 
I consider blogs and delicious to be tools that can be easily implemented on a library’s website and have the greatest impact. They both allow for community collaboration and sharing of information. I feel that face book and wikis have the least potential for library service. When dealing with public libraries I am not sure that wikis are that useful. For academic libraries a wiki is great. In one of my classes we are working on a wiki project, where we all had to post our work on it. This tool was very useful in terms of being able to share information with other group members, and eliminated emailing back and forth.
 
During the term I used all the tools that were listed on the course outline. For example,     facebook, RSS feeds, wikis, media sharing with flickr and digitization, and YouTube. The ones that I am still using are RSS feeds, which are great for receiving news and information on topics of interest. I really like the idea of YouTube and how it could be used for marketing and libraries. I will keep this in mind if I acquire a management position and I have a role in how things are marketed in the library. I also love the idea of media sharing with flickr and digitization in libraries. I find myself going on several library websites and searching their digitized sections. I am noticing that more and more libraries are using digitization as well as other types of businesses. Learning more about Wikis was also useful for my one course where I had to use a wiki for my group project. I felt a lot more comfortable with the terminology and what they were all about. I am now using a blog more frequently, and delicious has become my new best friend! I have used it before but having to actually use it for this course every week, has taught me how important this tool is. If you take a bit of time each week to tag a bit of information, you can build a much better information source for yourself.
 
This is my first distance education course and the experience has been great! I was able to follow the course syllabus and learn as if I was in a classroom setting. What made it easy to follow were the clear instructions.  I also felt the blogging was beneficial for this course. They helped me to understand how others interrupt the readings differently then myself, as well as explain some of the tools that I might have been unclear of.  The Group work was a challenge in terms of communicating with three other people online and trying to understand what everybody means. I enjoyed this because it taught me that what you think you are writing is not what other people are interpreting. You then learn you have to keep writing it until somebody understands your point. It teaches you different ways of conveying your message. It also taught me that I will take another distance course.
 
In terms of the course, everything was great for me! I liked the way it was set-up week by week and having weekly deadlines for the readings and blogs. I really enjoyed having to comment on other student’s blogs as well as writing one. I really like that because I was able to learn from others as well sharing ideas. I wouldn’t change anything.  For me the experience in the past 13 weeks has been a great learning one. I feel a lot more comfortable trying new technology and I have a much clearer understanding of it. This course has given me the courage to not be afraid of trying new technology. It has also taught me more about the benefits of it in the library world as well as how we have to keep learning about it. This course has made me want to learn more about technology.