This was an incredibly exciting learning experience for me! Thank you to the Library 2.0 team, Laurel and David, for designing and facilitating the program and to KCLS for sponsoring and supporting this labor and time intensive program for staff development. It has been worthwhile several times over for me. It has fostered my lifelong learning goals as a librarian, in both my teen services and reference work, as a mom of a teenager and as a constructive and productive citizen of a constantly changing world in which technology is playing a larger and larger role.
All of the learning sessions were useful as they offered an overview of what is available in cyberspace. I knew very little starting out the program and, therefore, was often surprised by the variety and sophistication of tools available. I was also often surprised at the creativity of web-users and the willingness of people to design and participate in web-based experiences. It also continues to amaze me how much time people spend online and all the opportunuities that exist to live online--a good reason why libraries and librarians should be cyber-savvy!
My favorite experiences were *Creating a Blog, *Flickr, *RSS Feeds, *LibraryThing, *Mash-ups, *YouTube and *Podcasts. My most frustrating experiences were with MySpace and del.icio.us. I would haved liked a longer session on the KCLS ecollection (music/videos as well as books).
Learning 2.0 was well set up and clearly defined with an understandable format, flow and goals. It was easy to be successful. Also, having work time to go through the program was crucial; it fostered communication and sharing with the workplaces and cluster. staff helped each other out and learned together -- wonderful concept and result! I would love to see similar training opportunities as new library-relevant technologies appear -- YES!! I have discovered I really enjoy learning hands-on online.
Improvements: only minor ones needed. As others have pointed out, most of the sessions took longer than 20 minutes; I averaged 45-60 minutes per session. That was OK, but it would have helped to have a more realistic time estimate before starting each session. And perhaps only two sessions a week -- three sometimes felt overwhelming to those of us who wanted to "keep up".
Available Help: I found I could get help with all my questions so far within the branch/cluster and I have had other staff members ask me for guidance, too. Having Learning 2.0 Advocates in the community libraries is helpful and reassuring--a good idea.
If I had to do it over agin, I would definitely choose to participate in the program. I am very glad I did.
