#23 Summarizing the Learning 2.0 Program

I enjoyed participating in the Learning 2.0 program, both as a participant and administrator. The weekly assignments kept me on track, because I never would have done all the exploring on my own. I had previously used very few of the Web 2.0 tools discussed, so I'm glad to have had the experience, and I think that I will definitely use some of them in the future for both work and personal projects. The Web 2.0 tools that I will probably use again are blogs, wikis, Flickr, YouTube, online word processing/spreadsheets/calendars, image generators, RSS, Library Thing, del.icio.us, social networking and podcasting. I guess that's most of them!

#14 Technorati

I like technorati as a blog search tool, but don't think that I would use it very much, at least not for anything related to libraries. I can't see the average library user going to technorati to specifically search for anything library-related. But as one of the authors commented in exercise #15 libraries need to go where people are, and apparently a great deal of people use Technorati. So maybe it would make sense to tag library-related blogs so that they show up when people are searching Technorati.

As for personal interests, I searched Technorati for blogs about sustainable living, and found a few good ones. Here are some of them, which I added to my del.icio.us account under the tag 'sustainability' (I'm very proud that I incorporated all three of this week's exercises into one discussion!:) But please don't look at the rest of my del.icio.us tags -- quite a mess!

#15 Library 2.0

I liked Rick Anderson's comments titled Away From Icebergs. He makes good points about the fact that today's libraries need to adapt their organizations to fit a predominately electronic environment, instead of continuing to operate as though print was still the predominate medium. Those days are gone.

We need to stop collecting things that we think people might need, but rather collect things that we know they need, adding to our collections on demand. Anderson also said that we should stop spending so much time instructing people on how to use databases, but rather create databases that work better. I look forward to doing this to our library catalog. Some libraries are already offering federated searching and many other features within their catalogs. We need to do the same. Check out the BOSS catalog at Oklahoma State University-- pretty cool