Fast Look Back My 2007 Knowledge Explosion

I am hard pressed to think of any year, outside of my student years, when I have learned so much. I started out in January 2007 with a fairly superficial idea about the importance and scope of Web 2.0 and social networking, and find myself one year later with so many new tools and ideas that it is hard to quantify how much things have changed for me. In January 07, I made three resolutions. Two of them I kept. They were:

1. Set up a wiki for our department
2. Launch a blog
3. Start using the gym at my university, where I have free access.

Well, two out of three. I had completed the first two goals by February 2007, which made me feel great! As to the third, uh, things happened…on the upside I have a leftover resolution to roll over into 2008, and I did achieve two out of three.

Here are a few things that changed for me in 2007

• I did indeed finally start a blog, and have felt good about that. I waited until I thought I had a focus on what I wanted to share, and also time to post. While I would like to post more often, I am pleased to have made a start that has garnered some very interesting contributions, comments, and other positive results.

• I did start one wiki, but that was far from the extent of my progress in this realm. I now consider wikis to be favored vehicles for both long and short term communication. An example of long term goals would by my LS Department wiki, which can be found at

  http://shsulibsci.pbwiki.com

  A short term example was a wiki I set up for a grant cohort group. Now that we are beginning instruction, I will move our base of operations to BlackBoard, but the wiki was nice for the interim. I now am an active user of several wikis, and have accounts with both pbwiki and WetPaint. My own wiki site has surpassed my static university website as my main base of operations: http://forwhomthebelltold.pbwiki.com/

• I am a new and enthusiastic Twitter fan, and find this environment to be especially good for learning things from people who share amazingly effectively in this 145 character per message environment.

• I continue to use Web 2.0 resources such as tadalist to try to organize my life, and even offer sessions on the topic of time management using such tools.

• Another tool I that has greatly increased in use and value to me is del.icio.us. I now do not know how I ever got along without it

• I discovered several useful nings and have learned a great deal from them.

• I increased my use of great tools like flickr, Google Docs

• I have fun with tools like Wists, Etsy, and others for social communication about less serious topics such as shopping and crafts.

• I am presenting to groups about all these great new tools. Here is a link to a presentation I made last year about this time, and which I will soon be updating: http://www.shsu.edu/~lis_mah/documents/socks2.0.html

With new tools and services evolving at such a rapid rate, I expect 2008 to be another year of exciting growth and learning. It would be interesting to hear from other readers about their evolutions during the past year.