The End of the Road

[The Mom writes -- and she's apologetic about the formatting] Everybody's trying to get somewhere quickly on the information highway. Thanks to Learning 2.0 for giving me a piece of the road map so I could begin to learn where things are and how to get to them.

This has been a stretching experience. As I may have written in an earlier posting, I appreciated someone taking the time to teach me things that my kids don't have the patience to introduce or instruct. It was especially fun to be able to show my son something he didn't know anything about... but that only happened once. When it came to MySpace and YouTube, I purposely avoided consulting my "experts" except when I couldn't get beyond a first step.

Lifelong learning is important to me, and 2.0 has been a great contribution toward this process. It's invaluable for me to have some idea of what the general tech-savvy public is doing out there, and some of the tools we explored (Blogger, MySpace, and wikis) are vehicles the library system ought to employ to reach that public.

Being a traditionalist, it was easy to write my blog posts from the viewpoint of my even-more-traditionalistic dogs. They are relationship-driven, as am I, and some of the tools for creating virtual relationships were not very appealing to them. But, if that's where people are, it makes sense to make their acquaintance online, with the future possibilities of face-time someday. From a business standpoint, I understand that valuable transactions and interactions are not limited to those carried on in person. Learning 2.0 has laid a bit of groundwork to help our staff begin to see what could be done. As for what else we ought to explore and learn about, I don't have any specific suggestions. I would like to see more of this, however. There is so much going on in the way of new technologies and new collaborations, we should not lag behind too far or we'll miss the boat!

There was always adequate help, support, encouragement, and enthusiasm for this course. For me, it helped to be gently pushed along by timelines that were flexible but distinct. I can't wait to start playing with my MP3 player! Until I learned what cool things they can do, I couldn't imagine why I'd ever want one.

My favorite part of this whole thing has been the blogging. It has been fun to write, and to find illustrations to summarize or provide a hook. I would like to maintain a blog, but it's not much fun unless you know someone is reading it. I'll have to give some consideration to marketing and target audience, and then perhaps it will be worthwhile.

Thanks for giving the dogs free reign over the library! They've loved being here!