23rd Thing: Final Thought and Reflections

Having just graduated only a few years ago from UNT with my MLS, I noticed that many of the things covered in this program were things I had been exposed to during my UNT days.

Nonetheless, besides just being a refresher, I felt that I got a more in depth experience with these things. In particular, I found it rather thrilling to create my own Blog and the experience of doing it made it seem like a much more tangible entity that exists in the digital world.

While I already knew the basics about FlickR, mashups and RSS Feeds, I felt that these exercises made me much more familiar with them in a practical manner. I also felt I learned much more about Del.icio.ous and Rollyo through this program and how one could use them to tailor make one’s own “mini” search engine, especially in cases where you want to zero in on certain reliable sites and “filter” out others that might not have much relevancy. I also thought it was good to have experience doing tagging, and it was nice to discover that Goodreads had a user friendly process for doing so. Meanwhile, though I was already familiar with Wikis, it was nice to see more of what was available in the library realms.

GoogleDocs was a pleasant surprise for me. It was nice to know that a mechanism on the internet exists to allow for microsoft word processing in those cases that the software package is, for whatever reason, not accessible. It could also be useful if you wish to share a project with someone in which you want someone else to work on a document with you, and obviously this could be in regards to library related activities. Meanwhile, podcasting and YouTube I had already had exposure to, though I had never done podcasting through Google Reader, which was a new experience for me.

From UNT, I had already had a high degree of experience with Netlibrary, but I found watching the Overdrive instructional videos very useful since it is not everyday that you are necessarily exposed to the process directly.

Overall, I found the experience both helpful and beneficial.