Final thoughts on Learning 2.0

There were some interesting discoveries, but much more for my personal life than my work life. Wickis are the only thing we have actually applied in the work environment. Some of the other sites have been entertaining, but most of what's out there is too superficial to be of much value in lifelong learning. Some of the social networking sites might also be useful, but again, more in my personal life than my work life. With the internet you can still maintain some social contacts even when you live in the middle of nowhere. It may be because of my age, but I still find electronic social interactions vastly inferior to personal ones.
There would have to be a really great prize for me to do this again. It has taken up much more time than I can really afford.

Library 2.0

I have very fixed feelings about all of this. I can see a usefulness for communicating with library users, and perhaps expanding the number of people who use the library, but on the other hand, I think there is too much hype. There seems to be an assumption that all library interactions can be transacted online. I'm afraid that the library as a place will fall by the wayside. Information retrieval on the web still seems to have a long ways to go. I'm confronted too often with browsing long lists, instead of being able to use information retrieval tools that will only give me what I want.

Social networking

It will take me a long time to get over the idea that things like myspace and facebook are not just for people who would consider me to be only slightly younger than the dinosaurs. This sort of stuff might be useful for people who are the only ones doing what they're doing in their organization, have esoteric interests, or want to establish business networks. On a whim, I decided to sign up for facebook. Perhaps even I can "friend".

Podcasts

Some interesting stuff here (things I agree with). Nothing I would feel right about listening to while I was trying to work, though. I have a feeling there's more of interest out there than I was finding. I don't know if the problem is inadequate indexing on the part of the sites, or my not taking enough time to learn how to thoroughly search the sites

Youtube

I didn't find much of interest at youtube; I'm really not at all in to popular culture stuff. Too much of what's there is like looking at someone's home movies (If anyone still does that). In the library setting, this might be useful for short instructional videos, either for users or staff. Having missed the last lunar eclipse, though, I did enjoy looking at the fast forward version I found.

Apps

I tried the Google application, and posted a 1 sentence document to my blog. My life is too boring to need many of these applications, but I see the advantage of having your documents not tied to any one machine. Storage space must be getting really cheap.

This is my text document using Google Docs & Spreadsheets.