Reflection

What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
All of it really. Looking back over this blog I am quite pleased to see it (my first ever blog) develop from nothing because I knew nothing to what it is now. I had heard the words, blog, widget, RSS but until I did the exercise I couldn't even have told you what RSS meant or what a widget is. The latter was a challenge that eluded me. I just couldn't get a widget to download to my blog from the 'minis' link.

Did get to use the Blogs gadgets and add pics and an RSS feed to the free library. Piccasa was fun as were the videos though I have got to admit having done all this on my dial up connection has been slow going. I wonder too about copyright when so much is downloadable and transferable to blogs and different authorship?

I now have a face book page and have a few friends linked in. My thoughts on social networking....Penny mentioned the word paranoid in one of her posts. Quite rightly I think. There are some major issues with privacy and the naive among us make it easy for those people with evil intent to access, use then abuse information given in good faith. I think young people are at greater risk primarilly because of the greater social networking they engage in coupled with their need to belong and lack of worldly experience.

I wonder if there are Blog bullies out there, like text bullies? I suppose there are given the ability to make comments on people's posts? What sort of world do we live in?

On the plus side carefully managed, Facebook and My Space etc are great fun and much more than simple email can offer. Privacy is the biggest concern but then the other night on TV there was a documentart on the Number of CCTV cameras up in cities around the world, including ours....I was left wondering if one can actually pee without prying eyes!!!!! Hundreds of CCTV watch us daily, angels or demons over our shoulders I wonder?

How has this programme assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
It hasn't made me want to swing into an IT career but it has opened my eyes and broadened my repitoire of skills, understanding and interest in technology.

Were there any take-aways or unexpected outcomes from this programme that surprised you?
I now have a Blog, Piccasa on my home computer, a face book page,, a Zoho account, a yahoo email and a flickr account!!!!! None of which I had before I started so I guess you could say I've got some take aways. I'll probably keep them to..now I know about them and how to use them. Thats a turn around because at the end of this tutorial I was initially going to delete it all.

What could we do differently to improve upon this programme’s format or concept?
I found it easy to follow, easy to use (except the widget minis link - couldn't get that to work at all) and enjoyable if not time consuming. It has taken a lot of my spare time to complete this. Perhaps future tutorials could be half as long then I wouldn't feel like I was giving up quite so much spare, (really home and leisure), time to complete them. Which kind of answers your last question....It has been fun and YES I'd do more.