01 October 2008

#23 Last thoughts

What a journey! Intense and fast paced, but the immense satisfaction from knowledge and skills gained made all that time spent on this programme worth while. I was aware of many of the things we looked at and have already been using some of it for personal and work purposes - RSS, wikis, Googledocs, Gmail, Flickr, YouTube, etc. are all old favourites. During this programme I discovered new favourites - Zoho, Image generators, a delightful old embroidery ebook on Project Gutenberg. Podcasts were a challenge. I took time to look at what is available and what are the issues/difficulties involved.

Another thing I gained from this programme is the value of blogging to sort out my thoughts. I can just echo what has been written in the last post of Library 2.0: An academic's perspective: "Blogging has turned out to be much more valuable an exercise than I could have imagined when I first started. There's nothing like the process of regular writing, especially public writing, to get a person thinking in ways that thinking alone doesn't do." This is of course part of a life long journey of learning. I think we are lucky to be in a profession which evolves all the time and leads to many learning opportunities - never a boring moment - so much to learn and explore and share.

It was a pleasure to read the other participants' blogs and comments, and listen to all the buzz the programme has created. Sharing the excitement, camaraderie, frustrations and the learning made this a rich experience. Some amazing talents have been show cased - graphic designers, web savvy people, authors with sparkling writing styles and those thought provoking posts.

A big thank you to everyone involved and especially the encouragement and support of the learning team to iron out the glitches. (Also, for reading through my long posts - sorry, but had to get it off my chest.) A high five to you all!