Friday, February 29, 2008

Item 23 -- The End

I probably enjoyed playing around in the photo and images sites the most, including the image generators, even though I was unable to copy an image to the blog from any site. I liked having the opportunity to sample a variety of the technology features that one hears being mentioned by colleagues but which do not really have a place in one's life, at least at the moment. I now have a very basic knowledge of some of them and might be able to assist patrons to some degree, but I wouldn't feel confident of helping with any advanced features of any of these technologies.

As for my lifelong learning goals, I like to stay aware of new technologies, especially ones that might be helpful for my job, but I tend to direct my "learning" toward things like The Great Courses by the Teaching Company. I want more out of life than spending it staring at a computer screen all day long. Too bad the library doesn't have any of these courses. They really are great.

There weren't any outcomes that surprised me. There were a few that frustrated me. For example, the "lesson" gives you certain information about a site, and then tells you to go that site and click on a certain feature. You click on the link, go to the site, and said feature is nowhere on the screen, or the screen doesn't resemble the screen in the tutorial at all. Another frustration was waiting for videos to load. On more than one occasion I took my break to let it finish loading.

One improvement I would suggest is making sure the websites attached to the links haven't been redesigned so that the directions are rendered inaccurate/useless. Also, not all staff computers had sound capability, which was necessary when watching the videos.

Item 22

OK, it's the luddite yet again. Has anyone ever considered that there is way too much "social networking" on computers and not enough face to face communication? I see the lack of in person communication skills on the Ref. desk. I couldn't open twitter to look at it, but I did look at the tumblr site. Reading those kinds of posts is to me like listening to sound bites in the news... very annoying little snippits that leave you waiting for the rest of the story, which may never come. I can see where these kinds of services could become addictive to some people who like to be always online texting, checking messages, etc. I've noticed that some of them tend to have short attention spans, and wonder if it's because they've learned to think in snippits.

This is not one of the new 2.0 features I'm likely to want to play with. Too time consuming and disruptive to keep track of, and too expensive if you're using a mobile phone, etc. for access. With apologies to Burt Bacharach and Hal David: Lord, we don't need another social networking site!