Week 10 - Wrap-up and Reflection

I've finally made it to the end - whew! When I faltered and fell behind in the middle of the semester, I was afraid I might not catch up, but I did! And I've learned some interesting things along the way.


The video clip Information R/evolution was very thought-provoking. When I was 12 in 1970, I made my career choice to be a Reference Librarian and followed the educational and career paths to make it happen. When I finally entered grad school in 1985 at the age of 26, how the library world had changed! My first class in Information Theory and its discussions of Noam Chomsky and random chaos theory made my head reel, and I was left wondering if I had made a career blunder. I survived this and other classes, slogged through Dialog database searching, and wrote all my papers on a little Mac borrowed from my husband's office (my electric typewriter was too noisy at 2 am in thin-walled apartments!) After working as a Reference Librarian for 9 years, I left to give birth literally as the Internet arrived in our library. I was a stay at home mom for the next 10 years, but we did have Internet access at home due to my husband's job as a computer analyst and programmer. (He's the techie in the family, and I will tell you that osmosis didn't work - none of his technical savvy has rubbed off on me at all.) When I re-entered reference work about a year and a half ago, I was amazed at how computers had infiltrated libraries, both as patron access stations and as critical reference tools. Now I wouldn't work without one. That video clip amazed me, I guess, because it reminded me of the path I took to get where I am today - from print books on the dusty shelves to sleek flat-screened computers. Okay, enough reminiscing...


One other side note - I read and found David Lee King's article very pertinent, but this portion disturbed me:
"You are asking them to participate: opening up the possibility to comment is a form of invitation to participate. It allows actual interaction with real, live people. it also sets up a type of digital town hall meeting where someone’s expressed opinion can be heard, discussed, debated, and distilled by others within earshot (ie., other readers)"
Now, I will admit that I am old as dirt, and that I am "connected but harrassed" as noted by that little quiz we took the first week. And I do feel that connecting with patrons by inviting them to interact using wikis, surveys, etc. and responding to them with respect is a great thing. But understand that this kind of "actual interaction" is done using the internet, not "real, live people". The anonymity of an email or the chatroom digital town hall should not be confused with talking with and looking into the eyes of a warm-blooded person. That's why it's called virtual reality. While you may be chatting in real-time with someone, you are not necessarily interacting/reacting to them the same way you would if you were talking face to face. The reason I'm making this distinction is because I have set limits on the amount of daily computer time my 11 yo son has so that he has the time and inclination to interact with real people in the real world he lives in. He needs to know that there is real life to experience and treasure, not just the virtual worlds inside the box sitting on the desk. Okay, I'm climbing off my soapbox now...

The various tools we learned about during this semester have many library applications, and I know many of these have been listed on other blogs. Suffice it to say I've learned about a variety of things I hadn't even heard of when I signed up for this course!
I think my favorite has been the blog. I've felt a sense of accomplishment as I've added features to it as a result of the various assigments we were given. I also like having the blogline account with the various rss feeds I've subscribed to. It's a handy one-stop source I can check for the things that interest me. The Flickr assigment was probably my most confusing, but I did triumph when I linked my Vulkin Kat pic! Of course, now I need to do it again so I can remember how...maybe this will be the push I need to start using my husband's digital camera and downloading pics to share! Hmm....) The LibraryThing and del.icio.us (I really hate typing that name!) assigments were also quite useful - both are things I will be using in my personal life. I'll have to see about the wikis, although I have a feeling we will be using them at work now!

I liked the way the assignments were structured. While I did appreciate some of the step-by-step directions, I can understand the reluctance to spoon feed us too much. It really is a good idea to use the tutorials and help sections of most sites, to just learn by playing with them. The little extras at the end of each week were fun, though I didn't always have time to do them all. I hope to go back and do some more of the fun things when I make more time - please don't delete any of the assignment pages from the semester 1 so we can refer back if we need to. The extra time you gave us to catch up assignments was crucial for me to finish, so I hope you'll do that during the 2nd semester, too.

If you had asked me a month ago if I was going to sign up for semester 2, I'd have said probably not. But the funny thing is, I've finally gained some confidence and interest in some of these new (to me) sites and tools, and now I'd like to learn some more! So, I've sent an email to Jean to sign me up for the 2nd part.

Finally, I'd like to thank all the people who acted as facilitators for us during the semester. I've really appreciated your comments, suggestions, and encouragement. You've made the assignments interesting, relevant, and fairly short. Plus, you've managed to nudge an old stick in the mud into reaching out of my comfort zone to learn some technical things that I could even share with my savvy son and husband, and that's a very good thing! And to my fellow students/bloggers - thanks for sharing your comments with me, too. I appreciated you taking the time to read my ramblings. I hope to explore some other student blogs between the semesters.