Muchas gracias

Following self-guided instruction has always been easy for me. I have to admit to “cheating” and doing many of my assignments at home since I did not have the time at work (so many other pots on the stove to tend to). I feel I learned a lot.
I was not aware that there was a second birth of the Internet – I was aware of many of these applications but not aware that there were considered web 2.0 applications. I always felt that these applications were just an extension of all the wonderful stuff the internet has to offer – a growth of the Internet that was going to come along once more of the masses were online. Look how far the internet has come since its birth. I’m sure HTML wasn’t even a thought yet look how quickly that spread the popularity of the Internet. The explosion of email, the heyday of dot.coms, instant messaging… I see web 2.0 applications as yet another growth of the Internet. I believe in a matter of years, if even that long, there will be yet another growth of the Internet.
As librarians, we have always (or were supposed to) had a high emphasis of adapting to new technologies and guiding our patrons to those. In a way, web 2.0 applications have changed that since many can guide themselves; however, I still believe a wide digital divide exists in our society, and even more so in the world. It is our mission to help ALL of our patrons, and not just the ones blessed to have a computer at home, or elsewhere, where they are not limited to 90 minutes per day. If you are job hunting, taking a course, or emailing family & friends, that hour-and-a-half goes real fast. One may not get the opportunity to delve further into the Internet and all it has to offer.
But I digress. Web 2.0 applications are wonderful, like email was a wonderful “discovery” or Mosaic or Amazon. I enjoyed this self-instruction since it was a way to become more aware of new developments. I did not mind doing many of the assignments at home since it led to more guilt-free browsing than I would have done at work. I also welcomed the feedback on my posts, as well as following my fellow “classmates” progress by reading their posts.
My favorite discoveries were being able to load a slideshow onto a blog (Google Docs) since I could directly apply this to something I was working on for work. No more worrying about copyright if it is my own creation. Although I don’t find myself using it, I liked Rollyo for I could have shown that to students in my computer classes. And being able to load videos straight to a blog was fun (although I am still worried about copyright issues there. My husband tells me that it’s YouTube’s problem and not mine).
I was also pleased to discover that I had already been using some of these web 2.0 applications, without even knowing I was doing anything extraordinary. I would definitely recommend this Play@2Learn program to coworkers. I would definitely do another one of these self-guided instructional courses. And I definitely enjoyed myself. I thank Joan and Joy for the development, for even thinking of this, and more importantly, for leading this when god only knows they have enough on their plates as well.
Thanks to you both.