Week 14: Final Thoughts

Since I spent all of my effort last week reflecting on my personal experiences with social software, my impressions of the types we covered in this class, their applicability and usefulness with regard to the library, as well as best practices for libraries that wish to implement some of these tools, I will limit my musings this week to a final reflection of the course itself.

I guess I can start off by letting you know that I have never taken a distance course before, this is my first and last...since I'm all done with my MLIS after this semester.  That being said, I can't compare the quality of this course in terms of other distance experiences I've had, but I will say that I can't imagine the distance learning experience getting much better than this, barring the possibility of teleportation for the UWO MLIS class of 2150.

All kidding aside, though, I really feel that the format of this course in addition to the solid supporting software and tools are what made it so fulfilling as a distance learning experience.  The fact that this course occurred exclusively electronically was great because it didn't require any inconvenient travel on behalf of us (I have seen some course descriptions for so-called distance courses that require a certain number of in-person lectures...attendance mandatory).  And, despite my initial misgivings at how a course conducted online could possibly be as beneficial as the 'real thing' I would go so far as to say that a course like this does an amazing job of replicating the real 'classroom and lecture' experience because it wasn't simply doing the readings and then writing what we thought....the blog platform that supported the course allowed us to create discussions and interact with one another almost as if we were in that classroom having a discussion.  And, of course, the weekly chat was the icing on the cake....regretably it became more and more difficult for me to attend the chats as the semester progressed, but the ones I was able to participate in were great. 

And of course, aside from the content being very interesting, I really liked how every week it was divided into two categories: 1)the basics, that covered anything and everything essential to know about each piece of social software we covered and 2) case studies that built on those basics and really showed us through real-world examples how these tools can be applicable in a library environment and which libraries were having success with their efforts.  It was also nice to have such a large number of readings to choose from each week so that, in the case that someone might already know the basics on a certain tool, they could skip the basic readings and go right into the ones that explored the many nuances and implications of the use of that tool.  

All in all, this has definitely been one of the most interesting classes from my FIMS experience and also one of the most practical - the latter being one of the most valuable aspects of the course.  I don't personally work in a library environment, but I do work in the information field and in close contact with many libraries and it was the versatility and practicality of the course content that allowed me to not only learn about all of the tools we covered, but to be able to see how they could be applicable in a number of different contexts - including the field in which I work. 

Thanks to everyone for the interesting blog posts, great comments and feedback, and discussions and, of course, thanks Amanda for a great final semester! To everyone else finishing up this semester - actually to everyone - good luck in the future!