Summarizing our journey

Here I am at the end...What was my favorite discovery? How different everyone's approach was to this course. And how lightly I began to approach the fun elements of exploration.

How has this affected my lifetime learning goals? I want more monitored courses and less participatory like myself---so I learn from someone who knows more than me! I'd love to have been mentored with this.

What surprised me? How easy it was to make an avatar and how "uncreative" I felt doing it. I guess role playing is just not that interesting to me. I like myself in the here and now.

What could be done differently? Make it easier to keep track of all the accounts and passwords somehow...I realize that would be a challenge. Maybe introduce Google docs earlier to get participants to learn and keep track of all these accounts and passwords at the same time.

Would I participate again? Probably. It seems social networking is here to stay and some of it is clearly fun and useful.

How do I describe this? Like anything you first try, the immediate outcomes may not be what you are expecting, but looking back you will realize how much you learned. It changes your approach to your own work and to helping others with their's.

Your just dessert for following along to week #20

Change, change, change

Week #19's assignment is to explore award winning social sites and blog the experience. Because I went to a Bethesda restaurant last night and have an upcoming event in Chicago, I decided to explore the Citysearch tool and compare the web results for the suburban area of Bethesda on the east coast and the urban area of Chicago in the midwest.

I found the site fairly intuitive and easy to use with lots of short reviews and well displayed essential information on a wide variety of restaurants and hotels in both places, although the suburban area seemed to have more chain establishments listed than the city did. I liked the sort by menu's options and useful arrangments as a result, especially for the city because of the large number of establishments involved. I thought the information was good on detail, including such facts as: at the Belden-Stratford Hotel in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, they welcome your cat (just bring a $500 refundable deposit, too).

I'll explore more of these sites as there are sure to be others I could use as well.

#17 didn't work for me but I got to make this cool map instead :)

My Visited Countries

Get your own Visited Countries Map from Travel Blog

A world of wikis--on beyond Wikipedia!

Posting for the week #16 assignment turned out to be more fun than I thought it might be. I'm using the gadget line below for links-check it out!

Take a break! It's spring!

Tagging, A Game on the Blogs

Knowing what exactly to tag a post can be fun to figure out. Who knew "NBA" would be so popular? Welcome to the Most Popular Name game 2010.

On to #13- Delicious!

With the tutorial not working, the useful beginner's guide has a fatal error today, and then several habits of highly successful delicious users' page could not be found; what's a girl to do? So I moved right onto the site itself and explored the "Learn More" link---this link is mostly a marketing tool, but there was some information there so I explored as much as I could with the short time I had. I might set this up at home. At work it seems less useful because we have folders for individual bookmarking which seem to work well enough. I might set it up just so I can go from computer to computer and have all the bookmarks I use accessible. I might think about creating a "home" set and a "work" set...

Rollyo is "undergoing maintenance"

I didn't have a chance to try this site, which sounds like a cleaver and useful idea but without seeing it, I can't comment much on the reality.

Library Thing

LibraryThing is a fun way to list books you've been reading, partially read, or mean to read. Easy to use and fun even if you're not a librarian! The Library of Congress link wasn't working the day I set things up tho. Guess I'll have to check those titles back again later.

hazards! (not ice or snow)

One of the hazards of the web seems especially apparent in the creative aspects such as the ones suggested by this exercise in week #10. Some of these image generators no longer work exactly as they did when the exercise was planned-that is, their exporting capabilities are not possible with our work place software or the web pages have expired (the originators moved on to other things probably). It seems word of mouth is the best way to learn about new avatars, etc. The fun is in the activity, not the exercise, so to speak. :)

Who knew a "business suit" was required for job opportunities in Venice?

RSS = Means with No End in Sight, It's Week #9

Newsfeeds crop up everywhere once you know what the icons mean. It's a simple way to see alot of news at once but it seems you can saturate your site with them easily-like being in the ice cream shop when you are hungry, then having to hurry up and eat the triple cone before it melts.
It seems like more and more sites are going with this interactivity, streaming new and old news; it can be a challenge to find good sites. Asking a friend or co-worker seems to be good advice and learning how to drop one is useful too.