20th Thing - Summary

20th Thing Summary:
The 20 Things was an excellent exercise both personally and professionally. It did meet my lifelong learning goals of always learning new things and satisfying my curiosity. My one surprise was the amount of people out there ‘sharing’ whether it is pictures, favorite books, music, etc. Not my style but apparently for many it is!

Favorite sites that I explored included My Space, Library Thing and Flickr. On the personal level, My Space gives me the opportunity to ‘visit’ with my new grand nephew in Massachusetts and other far away relatives and Library Thing is a good spot to put all those books I’m meaning to read. I am excited about the possibilities of using Flickr at work for a project long in the works – a visual storytime resource catalog. PRL may want to have a presence on My Space as well, especially for teens. Many branches found a great side benefit to the 20 Things project – team building.

If we were doing the project again: I would have preferred to set up the program with basic training by trainers and then let staff explore the related links and do their exercises independently. I know my husband is currently doing a train the trainer program at another library system for their 20 Things. I think this would have relieved a lot of the frustrations and produced a more positive experience.
The list of activities was a good selection and mix, excluding perhaps Technorati which seemed to stump many people! The number was very difficult to keep up with whether for our predominantly part time staff or for full timers.
On the technical side, it would have been easier to have required software and hardware in place before beginning the exercise. Can anything be done about the spy ware? I’d caution people initially about keeping a list of passwords and user ids – maybe even several copies ;-).
These observations are based both on mine personally and on other staff’s comments.