Thing #23: Here at the end of all things...ersomthin.

*wipes brow* Whew! I made it!

And it was a close one--two weeks ago I had some serious doubts that I'd be able to finish by the 31st, and only with some dedicated effort (and some work at home) was I able to pull it off--but I did, so yay me!

Reflections, reflections...

What did I like best? I enjoyed the opportunity to learn so many new things as part of my job, that on the surface seem to have little to do with my job--at least the job I have today, meaning the role my position currently serves. It seemed incredible wrong some days to be at a public desk and in between helping patrons, I was fooling around with images on flickr, hunting down vids on youtube, writing blog entry after blog entry, and merrily adding rss feeds to my bloglines account. But *smiles* it was for work, and it was a lot of good training.

That's not to say I loved the entire process. Quite often, even though I had fun exploring and playing, I had a hard time finding a way to relate what I was learning with LibraryLand. I could find all sorts of ways to use these tools personally, as is plainly evident in so many of my posts. It was a much bigger stretch, at times, to apply these tools to a library setting, but I suppose it's the journey and not the destination, right? Someday I'm likely to find use for so many of these things, likely in a professional library setting, too.

It was a significant challenge to find time to work on this project, I admit. Pass me some cheese to go with my whine, please. Mostly it was because my work hours are extremely limited and if I wasn't busy with patrons, I had some other pressing tasks. Well, *passes cheese tray around* I'm sure I'm not the only one.

My least favorite of the assignments was probably flickr, because it wouldn't work right for me, and blogger itself, because it's so clunky and I'm used to a far more functional blog, but both of those are my issues. I also sometimes didn't feel like I had much of an opinion to share about a particular tool or my experience using it, but somehow I seemed to find enough to say, regardless.

If another self-discovery type of training program was offered in the future, I'm certain I'd consider participating, but I'd really need to dedicate myself to doing it at a more measured pace, and not waiting for time to suddenly "appear" for it to get done. It would also have to be a topic or a set of skills that piques my interest or is relevant to my position or skills I believe I should acquire.

Lifelong learning goals? Well, I accomplished the 23 Things, so I consider that meeting a goal, haha. I was motivated to finish because, ok, I wanted the flash drive and a chance at the iPod shuffle. But it's good to have that motivation, and I'm glad to have completed all 23 Things by the deadline. It's a good way to start the new year. :-)

Thanks to the SPPL Learning folks who put this all together--it was fantastically run and the directions were always clear and the tasks challenging but not impossible.

*toasts* Congratulations, all you Library 2.0 Learners!