Let’s just pause a moment and recap what I accomplished this week:
1. set up a new website domain (you’re reading it!)
2. learned smarter ways to search for images on-line (Googlerama)
3. played with Zotero
4. elevated my Twitter game
5. wrestled with Omeka, furrowed my brows at Scalar and Drupal
6. thought about the lack of oral history in architecture
7. was not made to feel better about copyright issues
8. impressed myself with Thinglink and had ridiculous fun with Animoto (my husband, who teaches a woodshop-safety class at our university, requested something that would attract and hold the attention of freshman students)
9. had big fun annotating film clips on YouTube (even if they’re not as immediately pretty as other tools)
10. got dizzy over the thrill of Google Map Engine Light
11. totally rectified an 18th-century map of Philadelphia
12. spent a few hours making a very spiffy StoryMap for my architect
13. crashed and burned with the new install for Omeka
Overall, many more successes than failures–and even the latter have value for defining limits and maybe encouraging re-thinking about the learning (or trial-and-error process) overall. While I am delighted that I can look back at having learned so much in really such a short amount of time, my work through the weekend did reveal some points of weakness. First, not everything has really sunk in, and I am reminded how important it is to practice new skills over and over to make sure they are really truly learned, even after an initial success. Second, as I tried to build a little project to display my new skills, I found there were aspects of the project that weren’t yet served by my little skill set, or that there were still things that I just don’t know how to do, even if I can imagine them or have seen them working in some other online source.
I am starting week two trying to balance these two main impressions: 1. delight that I know so much cool stuff, and 2. anxiety that I won’t know everything I really need soon enough!