Thing 23 - Final Thoughts

I am pleased and proud to have finished with the 23 Things on a Stick, even if I did have to do it in two rounds. Sometimes I was frustrated with how long it took to complete a thing if I wanted to do a good job of understanding the concepts and then blogging about them. I was always happy when the Thing addressed a concept I was already familiar with, like the assignment calculator and the ELM tools. Sometimes I was familiar with similar tools: for instance, Picasa and Shutterfly instead of Flickr. I like to work with photos so anything to do with photos was a hit.

There was a lot that I didn't know and struggled with. Sometimes the hours went by quickly and other times I had to force myself to do each section of a thing. The idea of RSS feeds seemed like a good one and I subscribed to both some blog feeds and some podcast feeds. I still intend to download the podcasts to my ipod so that I can listen to them on my walk. It's on my list of things to do for this week.

I didn't really care for the social networking sites or Facebook or Myspace. Just not my thing, I guess. YouTube as well seemed like such a waste of time in general, although I have found some good things there (generally not in the "most popular" section, though.)

I really learned to make use of the tabs feature in Safari (not a Thing) so that I could switch back and forth between my blog, the 23 Things on a Stick Blog, and whatever Web site I was looking at, all basically at the same time. My sons have been trying to convince me that tabs are the way to go, and I agree with them now. I also learned to put my thoughts into a blog draft while I was working on each Thing and then just clean it up a little to post. If I waited to blog until I finished a Thing, I couldn't remember what I wanted to say.

At this point, I'm ready to let go for a couple of weeks and work on some photography. Then I'll come back and pick a couple of Things to get really serious about applying to my work life (or home life.) I've also bookmarked Library 2.1 and intend to work through some of their things. 

In closing, this was a great experience. I discovered some new things, was reminded of some old things, and would do it all again--but it was much easier to do during the summer than it was during the school year. 

Thanks so all of your hard work, 23 Things team (and for reading all of these blogs--must have gotten a little repetitive). You have a lot to be proud of, too.