Blogs, Gadgets and learning

I hope you are all finding something of interest in these modules. From time to time I read comments like "interesting but can't see much use for it" when talking about some of the content encountered in CCLlearn. That may well be the case as I for one don't use blogging in my personal life although I could if my circumstances were different. But it is worth thinking about 'why should we learn to use a tool that we had not thought of using before (or may not have understood)?'

One obvious answer is that until we try something out we don't appreciate what it can do. And even if this doesn't have any apparent use now, at some point in the future it may fit the need for a particular tool perfectly - but that match-up might not happen if we haven't learned to use the tool in the first place. And of course we may need to help library patrons with difficulties in blogging or gadgets etc.

The other thing that matters here is that even though the tool may be ditsy or puerile (note the proliferation of gadgets that have scantily clad pin-ups washing cars or serving tea - all from your desktop) the skills we acquire in trying and using these tools are building our confidence as well as giving us skills that we can transfer to other applications. So to end my sermon... everything we do in CCLlearn is useful in some sense and helping us to get comfortable with the digital world we need to be in to be relevant to our communities.

By the way, if you have been experiencing freezes or incredibly slow internet, don't worry. This is perhaps the biggest frustration for everyone in CCLlearn. It is perhaps symptomatic of NZ's third world internet infrastructure. It may even be worse now we have free internet with the concurrent increase in patronage this is attracting. The bandwidth gets bottlenecked and I'm afraid there is no 'digital vaseline' to alleviate this. So keep trying is all the advice I can give (sorry!).