Summary of achievements!!!

When I began this subject, I was an infrequent visitor of Facebook, using it to catch up with family and friends. I was keeping a blog which I began as part of this master’s course, but it was effectively just a standard summary of what I was learning. As I have read extensively, followed others’ blogs, been part of the online Facebook community linked to this subject and dabbled in Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, LinkedIn and Second Life I have experienced a Web 2.0 awakening!

            Facebook, although known to me, has been an exciting source of collaboration, sharing and reflecting. I have enjoyed discussions with fellow students and lecturers discussing topical issues, solving technological problems (Second Life) and reading posts relevant to information professionals in the field. Delicious provides a social bookmarking tool that I had never used prior to this course. Whilst I found it challenging to initially work out, it was useful as a place to store links for assignments and further readings. I would like to continue using this for professional readings. I found Flickr was easier to navigate.

            Twitter was one of the most enjoyable social networking tools that I tried in this session. The succinct headings made it seem less overwhelming to a social networking native because I could see at a glance if I would be interested in following a tweet or not. I was quite excited to see my list of followers grow, and this only encouraged me more to use Twitter! I can see great value in using LinkedIn particularly if you were looking for new networks, even job prospects. For me personally, I did not find many reasons to continue frequenting the site as I had little interest personally at this point in time.

            Although initially sceptical, Second Life was a fun way to interact with a wide variety of “people” in many new ways. I loved conquering the simple challenges of walking and talking, sitting and flying. I was surprised to find that I was the only one with a pink world. Even more surprising to myself was my ability to follow Carole’s prompts to resolve this. I even taught myself to take screen shots, so felt that even before exploring the CSU library and beyond into other worlds, I was ahead!!