The end is where we start from

This is it, the end of 23 Things Oxford and the final posts are starting to pop up on many blogs.   I've been enjoying reading people's thoughts on the programme now that they have finished and seeing what they have found useful or not so much.   My aims with the programme for myself were a little different from most of the participants; as one of the team organising the course I was mostly looking forward to seeing how other people got on with the tasks and with their ventures into web 2.0.   I've found it really rewarding to see so many people making so much progress and enjoying discovering new things that could really help them personally, professionally, and in their libraries.   As a web 2.0 enthusiast myself it's great to see other people 'getting it'!   I've particularly loved hearing people say that their confidence with internet tools has grown and their fears dissipated by discovering both that it's really not difficult and that it's fun.   And I think it's fabulous that the 23 Things programme has turned out to be a real shared learning experience, with people talking about it to each other with real enthusiasm and helping each other along the way.

It's also been really interesting to read people's thoughts, both positive and negative, about the value of these tools, and I've often been prompted to think further about my own use of them in response.   This, combined with writing my own blog posts, has meant that 23 Things has really forced me to reflect on what I have done, still do, and could do in the future with web 2.0.   It's prompted me to do some much-needed housekeeping: I've given the VHL blog a makeover, pruned my feeds, and played around more with our Facebook page.  I've also been prompted to return to some tools I had tried out but abandoned in the past (iGoogle mainly, not that I'll probably ever really be a convert, despite completely understanding how useful it should be!), and been exposed to some new ones too - Picnik, LinkedIn, and ThinkFree.   I have to say I'm not sure how much my web 2.0 usage is likely to change from the programme - I think that having been playing around with web 2.0 tools for a good few years now I'm fairly settled in what I find useful and why - but it's always good to be challenged and to be prompted to reflect in this way.

Needless to say I'm a huge fan of what web 2.0 tools can do for both people and libraries.   They make it easier for us to find our way through the vast quantities of information on the internet, easier for us to talk to other people and to share bits of information that we find with each other.   This is all so completely up the librarian's street that it just seems odd to me that librarians wouldn't want to embrace these tools!   I'm delighted that I've been able to be part of running this 23 Things programme and I'm really looking forward to seeing what more web 2.0 services are introduced in Oxford libraries as a result of it now.