Thursday, April 10, 2008

Thing #23 -- Looking back on the program

I feel that I learned a lot through the 23 things on a stick program. The best parts of the program for me were as follows:
  • No driving somewhere in the winter (when the roads are bad) or the summer (when our library is crazy busy) to go over the topics.
  • Not needing to block out a specific time during the day to work on learning (this can be a problem when local meetings and regional webinars overlap).
  • Learning at your own pace ... too often classes proceed so slowly for me.
  • Thing #1 - learning to blog. I do plan to keep this blog going, although the focus will change to library events and book reviews.
  • Things #4-6 - online graphic design tools. It was so much fun to play with these tools, and our next library handouts will benefit tremendously from what I learned.
  • Thing #11 - del.icio.us. I'm using this for my personal benefit; it's great to have access to all my bookmarks on any computer I go to.
  • Thing #20 - Facebook/MySpace. I'd heard so much about these sites, and it was great to have a push to actually explore them.
  • I would add Thing #3 to this list, but I was already working with RSS feeds.

I would definitely do a program like this in the future. Yes, more online at your own pace learning PLEASE! I would suggest that ELM could be a program of its own ... I felt that was the least successful thing simply because there was so much and you could do the (non-challenge) parts just by following directions without really exploring on your own. I also felt the order that the topics were presented could be improved. However, overall, the program was excellent, and I had a great time exploring some new tools.

3 comments:

Linda said...

Do you think that it might have been helpful if we had had participants join the Ning earlier so there might have then been more interaction among participants, enabling them to help each other? I know that I got requests for help from some, saw that others were having trouble and tried to help, but seems to me this might have been something we should have done. What do you think?

23 Things said...

Linda's suggestion is a good one--put Ning earlier. Make those social connections for help and feedback.

congratulations on finishing and sharing your comments. Stay tuned for More On a Stick in fall or winter!

Smart Cookie said...

Yes, I think that having the Ning earlier in the program would have been very useful. I put all of the NCLC blogs (and a couple from other regions) on my RSS feed to keep track of what other participants were doing, but that didn't lead to the same level of interaction that the Ning promotes.