Evaluation

Evaluation is a great idea and one that I admit not doing enough of. I have found the hardest thing with the evaluation tools is to understand what each term refers to and then which of these items evaluates usage the best.
I have jooined up to Google alerts so it will be interesting to see what results come in. Hopefully I will be pleasantly surprised - but I have the feeling I will not get much results. Will keep you posted.

Delicious

I find delicious a good way to display a list of websites - Wagga City Library has used this method - it is more visually appealing than a huge list of website addresses. I found the hints useful and have passed them onto colleagues, particularly about organising the tag cloud.
Connections between the various social media is certainly increasing.

Twitter

Just tried to have a look at Twitter and could not as it had reached maximum capacity, come back and try again later. I guess this just shows how popular this has become. From the Tweets that I have read in the past this form of communication has not appealed to me. I can see how addictive this con become particularly when used with a mobile phone.
Tweeting seems to be a very interactive medium. We can tweet, but to also find out what other people tweet about you or add to their conversation.

Refresh

 I have found it fun to update the look of my blog, providing a bit of freshness. Amazing what a new look can do - even playing with the different colours.

The next stage

Technology is certainly changing and just when I think I have a handle on one thing another pops up that has great potential. This certainly come under the category of lifelong learning.
Knowing about a technology is one thing - I have found that the best way to learn is to actually participate and use the technology. When I went away on long service leave I created a blog so people at home could follow my adventure and I could even download a photo or two - gone are the days of just sending a postcard. The laptop is now almost a required travel accessory. I found the blog to be very useful for this and had positive comments from friends.
Unfortunately the blog I created for work did not have the same success - and in redeveloping our website we are even ditching the blog for other technologies. We will have to wait and see how this all develops.

The End

This course has come at the right time for me - as I will need to utlitise some of these functions into a new position that I will be taking up. It has given me a good overall picture of what is available and I particularly liked the short videos that introduced each topic. The next step will be to investigate further how to use these tools best - not just have them because everyone else has - they need to serve a purpose and have value to our library system. The journey has only just begun! I have also come to the conclusion that these tools will only be useful if people (staff or patrons) have an interest and interact within the communities set up - there is nothing worse than having a blog that is not updated or people are commenting on. I think that is the biggest challenge to libraries.
Thanks to State Library for producing this course.

Online applications and tools

It seems that the internet can help in so many ways - I like the idea of being able to work on documents together without e-mailing each other all the time. I have just gone through this process and it is so easy to delete an e-mail or forget to save the document - should of done this module a few weeks earlier!! Will definitely have to keep all these applications in mind.