Exercise #23: Reflections ... True Love Leaves No Traces

It's been an engaging exercise, for sure. Initially, I was a bit lethargic about pacing my entries and felt a certain disinterest in the blog format because I am not, typically, an individual who wants to post commentary that I'm not particularly passionate about. Sadly, readers, I was not passionate about Library 2.0 at the outset and I'm glad to report that I've learned quite a bit about a myriad of terms, technologies, and tools for which I'd previously had only the vaguest notion of beforehand.

I can recall a few months ago in November I attended this event with my wife in San Francisco. The event was the first annual "Vloggies" and it was an award ceremony for video bloggers. At the time we were marvelling at the fact that it was without a doubt the most filmed activity we had ever been to (think first day of kindergarten with 98% of parents documenting with digicams), but you know, they were all vloggers so what do you expect. Anyhow, what initially was an invitation to see something new and drink for free to live music at Cafe du Nord became kind of a learning experience as we quizzed each other "what exactly is del.ici.ous?" and "who the hell is Technorati?" I assure you these inquiries were bandied back and forth. So, long story short, I have benefitted from Learning 2.0 in being able to better understand and apply the power of these tools we have forced ourselves to investigate in these exercises.

Library Thing was a particularly fun exploration and the 2.0 awards list was endlessly entertaining. But again, even though most of the topics were familiar, I didn't really know del.ici.ous or Technorati and this discovery exercise enabled me to engage myself through the potential of how it may impact my life as a librarian. At times it seemed like too much all at once, but this intensive learning has it's benefits as well. I will say that the time committment was more than I anticipated but just like the Thigh Master it's always more work than you're lead to believe. I would definitely be open to more learning exercises such as Library 2.0 because in the end it was fun (at times), educational, and a great way to kill time when you'd had enough of the routine library existence. Yeah, well done to the Virtual Services Team one and all.