Friday, October 3, 2008

#23 (Ta DA!!!!)

In no particular order and without organization, here's the feedback.
  • Great program. I learned a lot and I know I'm going to go back and revisit various Things to explore further.
  • I truely appreciated the permission to play, along with the helpful nudges, hints, links and guidelines.
  • I'm the kind of person who needs to process information for a longer period of time before responding. There were several Things that I would have liked to have had more time to explore and think about, especially when considering how the tool (for lack of a better word) might be used in a (or 'our') library setting.
  • More time in general.
  • Sometimes it was frustrating to work on this alone. Yes, we could (and sometimes did) bounce stuff off of colleagues. But I think this would be really fun if it was done in small groups, like 3 people. This presupposes that all 3 people want to be involved. In an ideal world, we'd be able to devote 2 hours (just throwing that out there) once a week to playing around. Maybe self pace it? On the other hand, there needs to be an end otherwise we would get totally distracted and not finish anything.
  • While I'm not sure we'll be using everything we learned, I'm darned glad I know about it. (I listened to the debate last night, can you tell?).
  • I'm really curious to see how (or if) some of these Things become more widely used. Twitter for example. I talked to lots of High School students, adults, kids, professionals and overall the response I got was 'Twitter???! You mean like birds?' So maybe this is a phenomenon that's localized to techno-geeks (my apologies to techno-geeks everywhere).
  • On the other hand, we in libraries need to facilitate communication in all its forms. We need to support all these different forms of media and we have to continue exploring the new stuff, creating new ways to interact with our patrons.
  • Regarding utilizing these tools here at EPL, absolutely, but how savy are our users. We have a digital divide. What is our role in closing it? Thinking of kids and apps like Googledocs. If kids don't have a computer at home, or access to the internet at home, do they at school? Do they have email addresses? at school? Access to computers whenever? Are teachers supporting, or even teaching digital fluency? We can certainly step into that role but it would be better if we were working with schools, teachers and media specialists.
  • ...

4 comments:

kate.kniffen said...

Thanks for all your postings and congratulations. I've enjoyed reading what you had to say.

Anonymous said...

Congratulations on finishing. You must have noTHING to do!

laura said...

The Things may be over but we can still play!

Christie said...

Hey Gigi,

Congrats! I too would like a span of at least 2 hours to really produce...