Project Play Semester 2

I believe I'm a curious person. I know that I'm someone who thinks and wonders a great deal on the way to finding something out, rather than seeking to be told what the result should be. I've always been more hands-on, willing to find out what happens if I press this key or take this step. And, of course, some of what I try isn't going to work. But even that can be a valuable learning experience, both by ruling out what won't work and building tools that help me in dealing with future problems. It goes further than technological matters. My father helping me with household projects taught me to think in terms of improvising a solution. We'd be happy when something worked, not worry about whether it was the "correct" way to do it.

We covered a great deal in the two semesters of Project Play. Some tools I've come to use on a regular basis: Our department uses a blog to keep each other up-to-date with what's going on and we've added Meebo to our website for IM Reference. If I have a quick question for our Library System support people, I'll often IM them instead of trying to call. I use del.icio.us for links, don't get back to Bloglines as often as I would like to read the feeds I've set up, and continue to enter my books on LibraryThing. There were other tools I thought were cool, but haven't actually found a way to use them: Jott and Wikis, to name two. I visit YouTube and FunnyorDie at times, but don't expect to start making my own.

What was most valuable about ProjectPlay is that with web tools continually new and evolving, it was wonderful to have someone sort some of that out and say, "Here's what you should look at" and give us so many great examples of specific applications and sites where libraries have applied them. There's so much more to learn, and we have a great platform from which to keep doing that. We won't have more Project Play to guide us, but we need to explore links and tangents from sites we visit and keep up our reading to get tips on what we might try and find useful.