Task 23: Summary aka "Whew, I made it!"

Here is a quick summary from my feeback sheet:

Comment on overall time given for pilot:
I think that no matter how much time you give people it will never be enough. Although I was pressed for time (having been on holidays for 2 weeks at the beginning) I would still be as rushed if I had more time. so the time was just about right. I always get more motivated when I have a deadline.

Comment on relevance of tools:
Some of the tools I know that I will probably never look at again - ie. twitter, technorati. I can see the relevance for work of using RSS feeds, Wikis, Bloglines - the other tools were probably more of a personal nature.

Comment on specific difficulties:
Some of the links from the library link http://uqlibrary.blogspot.com/ didn't work - to get the instructions for some activities I had to go back to a previous activity and use the sidebar links (which usually worked)

Most Useful: RSS feeds, although I will be forever grateful to Del.icio.us. where I found the site www.seeqpod.com and now every member of the family can have their own saveable playlist playing when they are on the computer.

Most fun: librivox, youtube

Most difficult to use: Twitter, Second Life

MOST ANNOYING (HENCE THE CAPITALS):
The most annoying thing was having to create accounts and logins with google and yahoo and every other program - I realise that if you want to participate and store info you need to login but sometimes it would be nice to just browse without joining.

Overall View of the Program
I thought this was a very worthwhile experience - great to be given time to play around and familiarise myself with these new tools. As with anything it was just the tip of the iceberg and we will need to keep using some of these tools to keep our knowledge fresh. As much as we (I) might complain that I don't have much time and that the training impinges on my workload, the reality is that working in a library - this is our workload. The kids coming into this university will be very familiar with a lot of this technology and we can't really claim to be "cutting edge" if we can't talk on their terms. At least we won't look completely out of touch if we know the vocabulary. I will probably go back and revisit a lot of the tools here now that I have had a basic introduction.

I really enjoyed reading other the blogs from the other pilot members - shows what a diverse group we have working here.

Suggestions:
Look at Picasa (I prefer to Flickr) and Facebook or Myspace