Week Thirteen : How Social do I feel?

This week, I'm going to look at the more personal reflection aspects of these final weeks, mostly because the majority of my free time is going to finishing the project, and I'd like to do a discussion of social software in libraries and best practices justice.

My favourite social tools that I've used this semester have to be RSS aggregators and Wikis, though I've liked something about each of the tools we've looked at.  I like how easy RSS makes it for me to keep up with my favourite blogs, and keep up on news on a global and a local level - all in one place.  My beef now is when sites don't offer RSS feeds (like one of my favourite guilty pleasure blogs, Lainey's Entertainment Update).  I've also found wikis to be very helpful, especially while working on the group project - a wiki helped keep us all on the same page, split up work, and manage everything effectively.  I think my least favourite week was gaming & virtual worlds.  I think that's because I had so much difficulty using SecondLife, and because it's the topic I have the most trouble wrapping my head around using in a library.

I've liked blogging so far - it's been one of the most interesting courses I've taken, and I think a lot of that is due to the discourse created by the blog posts and comments of my classmates.  I've been able to look at these topics from several points of view, and everyone gets their say (which isn't always the case in a class discussion).  I also like that I can work on my "discussion" whenever it's convenient for me.  The workload was heavier than I expected, but not onerously so.  The blog holidays certainly came in handy when time got too tight, which it did several times this summer for me.  I'm definitely looking forward to polishing up my final assignment and getting it off my plate - my last major assignment before completion of the program.  I cannot wait.

As for whether I'll continue to use these tools, I think the answer is definitely.  I check my RSS feeds several times a day, am also on Facebook more than once a day, and often bookmark sites or articles using del.icio.us (which seems to have undergone a major change since I last looked at it).  I'm excited about the potential of using these tools more in the future, especially at work.  I'll be starting at a small public library this fall, and I can't wait to try and implement some 2.0 tools to help enhance library services.  But that'll have to wait for next week.

 So this is it.  My penultimate blog post.  Complete.