Week 7, thing#23: Final Thoughts

Personnally I think this is good learning experience. Because I am late to the program it gave me the opportunity to test many updated versions of social media sites and tools. I found the following sites and software are most useful to me and have great potential to be used (some of the function may have alreay been incorporated in our web pages) for better serving our customers. Those sites and programs are: Bloglines, Flickr, RSS feeds, Online image generators, Wiki, You Tube, Podcast and OverDrive. Mastering those tools to a certain degree, one can produce pretty decent blog pages or host a web site to communicate and socialise with similar minded individuls or groups. I think online productivity tool, although improved tremendously in the last couple of years, still has a way to go if it wants to compete with Microsoft for real business. It can not be denied that they are great as free tools. One surprise factor, at least, to me is that many online guides and web sites are not well maintained, probably because of lacking of staff or time. My feeling is that it may be easy to set up the program but to keep it current with all new information and technology would be a challenge. I think the instructions and guidance to the participants for the learning program provide Maryland Learning 2.0 is excellent, I especially like the suggested excercises. Although according to the instruction, I am supposed to spend 45 minutes for each "Thing", I think I routinely spend far more than that.