The 23rd Thing!

Wow, here we are at the end. After trying this back in the summer and quitting after the first week, I never thought I'd make it to the 23rd thing. It was fun and I learned a lot along the way.

One of my favorite things was to play around with the photo manipulator/generator things. It's amazing how many templates are out there to fool around with. As fun as they were though, I think I liked the more information-based things. Learning more about RSS Feeds and Readers was helpful, both for being better able to help customers, and also for my personal use as well.

Also, the web-based applications were really cool too. I never really thought about products like Zoho and Google Docs before. Depending on the level of security that you need, they can be a great option to having to physically posses word-processing software and storage media. Anyone using public and shared computers - such as our library customers - can especially benefit from these services.

I think that JPL Learning 2.0 has assisted me with my lifelong learning by making me realize that really all you need to do is be open-minded and explore things. Especially in a very low-pressure and somewhat informal environment as the one that has been created for this training. There's no reason to be afraid of making mistakes - that's how we learn sometimes. I liked that the class was structured yet not rigid, if that makes sense. Now when I come across new technologies I can simply explore them and learn about them at my own pace, and hopefully have fun to boot.

I think that the class was well-designed, but more than one hour is really needed to fully explore things. I found myself doing some of the exercises from home since our work schedules are so busy. Granted, there are generous make-up time built in to the program, but that's the only thing I would suggest: more time. I'm sure that I will go back on my own and get into some of the lessons a little bit deeper though.

I really liked this class, and would definitely do something like this again.