#18 Summary: the end/beginning

Da-daa! Well I finally crawl over the finishing line several months later. I feel like I've just completed the Dakar rally on a bicycle. First of all, hats off to Lynette, Leanne and Mark for coaching us all through the program. Looking back at my posts I seem to have done a fair bit of grumbling and been cynical about the web 2.0 universe more than once but nevertheless I think this has been the most creative and interesting training program we have been offered in years.
Being self-paced meant I often found it hard to find time to work through the exercises as I found it required a bit of concentration to really explore new applications and so the program would end up on the back burner for weeks at a time. There was also the occasional frustration born of working in isolation when confronted with new interfaces that just didn't work for no apparent reason, were not that intuitive or had online help that was not that helpful. That is all part of the environment though - there are bugs and glitches, people search and browse in different ways and something that is obvious to one person is utterly obscure to another. I think the group workshops were a great way to overcome those issues (even though I rarely got along to them). Not only have I learned heaps I am actually applying new web 2.0 tools and it has changed my perception of the web. I have recently set up a wiki for my classmates at uni, and now add all my bookmarks to del.icio.us - very handy.
I am currently grappling with meebo and the IM thing and am pretty unimpressed at the moment because it's doing the just not working thing. Then again sometimes the technology works beautifully and the people don't. After putting a chat widget into my wiki I am still the only one who ever seems to be in the room (shades of my childhood budgie burbling away to himself in the mirror, through an increasingly opaque layer of dried budgie saliva). That had a bell on it too. The similarities are disturbing. Still there is nothing like 'doing' to let you understand how something really works. That has been the great experience of this program, that gives you that really direct sense of understanding, personal investment and functionality offered by the web 2.0 environment. Permission to play has been a revelation as an opportunity to learn about emerging technology.