Sunday, December 2, 2007

Week 13 Blog

The high point of the training was that I found out new technologies that I have not ever used before though I have heard of some of them and now have learned about them.
At least now I am familiar with them when people talk about them. Also I can use some of them for my own personal use. It gave me the opportunity to confer with my colleagues about them and learned from them. The low point was finding the time doing them without feeling stressed. In a way I am glad that I had the opportunity to learn about the 23 things.

I think the 23 things are not all going to be used in the future but some of them are here to stay. We just don't know which ones at this early stage. I know some librarians have used del.icio.us to create links to resources on the internet for students and grouped them according to subject. Talking to a Librarian, the idea came up that Flikr could be be used to display images of some resources like the CRC materials for the Rockingham students because a catalogue record doesn't really tell what an object looks like.

I think the technologies which are used for collaboration are going to be useful in the future as people get more and more email they can use the other technologies like twitter, google documents, wikis to collaborate withh a selected group of people and share ideas.

Technologies for disseminating information like podcasts, youtubes and secondlife will be used but I don't know if it will change the basic way libraries organize themselves. I think they will be extra tools we can use rather than replacing what we do now.

We have seen that our learning common has brought more students into the library rather than less because our internet is faster. This is a plus for our library.
The exciting thing is that we have a bigger choice in the way we do things now and I expect that we will always use some of these technologies but I don't think that they will replace our core services.