Week 13: Personal experiences with social software

My experience with social software in this course has been good, for the most part. I am fortunate to have had the chance to learn about social software tools before I possibly encounter them in the future. Social software tools that work for me and that I would continue using are wikis, online social networks and perhaps blogs. I was already using online social networks prior to this course and will continue to use them in the future. I gained a new perspective of social networks and would not have considered many aspects about it if not for this course. During the course, my group worked on our project using a wiki. I found the tool to be very useful. I found it to be so useful that I set up a wiki to plan a camping trip. Multiple members could edit the “to bring” list and in the end, we only forgot a tarp, the tent fly and a flashlight.

 I got a better feel of blogging and grew more comfortable with it as the course progressed. For this course, my classmates and I were able to share ideas and thoughts on a variety of topics and get a more in-depth idea of each others thoughts and ideas. More could be covered than would be possible in a classroom setting where there are time constraints on discussions. I enjoyed the experience of blogging and I believe I would try to incorporate blogging into future professional and perhaps personal arenas.

I have set up a Google Reader for my RSS feeds.  However, I find that I do not check my feeds very often. I still visit pages I normally visited before setting up my aggregator.  I do like that I can find news I am interested in in one place, without having to visit several sites to search for it on my own.

I am not sure if I would continue using del.icio.us and Flickr. I can see the use in tagging, however, I have not grown accustomed to tagging yet, and would realistically probably not use it quite yet until I find a personal use for it. I imagine I would be using Flickr more often in the future as I do have many photos that I would like to backup on the internet and classify.

Overall, the course has been very valuable to me. I have learned about many new Web 2.0 technologies that I did not know about before the class.