Oh – my – God!!!
Praise be – I’ve made it to the end. I must admit, despite my frustration and grumbling, that I have found this to be a useful exercise. It gave me an appreciation of the wealth of activities on the web and what the “bright young things” are getting into. May be particularly useful in the future in keeping track of my daughter’s journey through the web as she starts secondary school.
I found that is is really easy to be confused when trying to navigate the web. For example, RSS feeds. The impression I was given was that it was the hardest task to do on Library 2.0. Therefore, my expectations were very low of doing this properly. I set up my Bloglines account and put some feeds into the account and then waited – and waited – and waited. Finally, I went to Lianne and told her of my failure. She looked at my Bloglines account and said, “but Jenny, you have all these feeds waiting to be read from the sites you selected”. Derrr! My mind had set up the expectation that I would receive lots of emails of new items from my selected sites. While you can set this up, it is not what we were required for this exercise. So failure turned into success. This was the most extreme case but, in general, I feel that you need to keep your mind open to the possibilities of the web while cultivating your friends and colleagues to network the “how to” aspects.
Having done this blog I can see why some people’s blogs in the outside world are such scrappy or self indulgent affairs. It takes some thought and creativity to do a blog that can be of more than just a “puff piece”.
I think that Learning Library 2.0 was a bit more complicated that the PR said and is not really a self-help exercise. You do need the support of colleagues to make sure you are on the right track or provide shortcuts. But it has opened my eyes to what is possible and will inform my discussions and ideas in the future.
