#23 Finished at last!

TS Fay sort of interrupted my progress on this learning program but now I'm finished at last - yay!

Overall, this was a very, very good experience for me, both personally and professionally. It reminded me of some services that the library offers that I had kind of forgotten about (like Overdrive); it turned me on to some cool things that I had not done before (like Bloglines - I am a total addict now!), and it helped me get more comfortable with current Web technology, which will definitely help me in assisting library customers.

I do think, however, that the time commitment was greater than predicted, although I spent more time on some lessons than others. It was hard to find even one free hour a week to get to it, especially in the last few weeks, and I know of quite a few people who simply quit because they just couldn't find enough time to do it. Which is sad, but that's the climate in public libraries today - not enough funds to pay enough people to do the job. I worry about our future as an institution.

But back to the matter at hand. The other issue I had was that there wasn't a lot of consistency in the links that were included in each lesson. Some opened up a new window when you clicked on them, some didn't. Some were even broken and wouldn't work at all. This would have been very confusing to a newbie who didn't know their way around a Web site.

For the next go-around, I'd recommend a longer period of time to work on the lessons (how about just one lesson per week instead of several per week). I'd also like to recommend that someone go over each lesson with a fine-toothed comb and check all the links to make sure they work and are consistent. I'd recommend new windows for all offsite links so that learners don't navigate away from the original page, to which they must return to post their comment to finish the lesson.

As to the question of whether I would participate in similar programs in the future? Absolutely yes. It was very valuable and lots of fun. Thanks so much to everyone who worked on this!