Thing #7 - Communication tools

Well, I've successfully avoided this thing for way too long. I found as I went through the directions that this was a very long thing. So... email is as essential to my life as anything. I wish it had been in existence during my school years - it would have sure been easier to stay in touch with people and not lose track of each other. How nice to shoot off a quick message as I think of something, and know I'll get a response later when the recipient reads it and has a chance to get to it.

IM gets a less enthusiastic endorsement. In the classroom, there isn't a good way to make use of this with other professionals during the day. Our students don't have access to this during the day either. For a librarian, however, there may be more opportunity. For example, a teacher doing research for a lesson may IM the librarian, looking for assistance. The immediacy of IM is a huge advantage, the lack of access a deterrent.

Text messaging is like IM, but portable. Again, our school does not allow any cell phones to be in operation during the school day. The video on the 23 Things website showed a positive use of text messaging, but I would guess that there are 50 personal text messages sent in the library for each one with media purpose! Distractions are as old as time itself, so maybe schools need to reconsider their policies anyway. Personally, I need to add text messaging unlimited to my phone plan if I expect to continue frequent "conversation" with my own daughters. For them, voice messages and sometimes even phone conversations are old tools for them.

I have been part of a Google group before, and it is another positive tool. My experience is that group members use it often and post to it often - for awhile. Once the urgency of the group's work has faded, so does group participation. It's convenient since you can go to it as you can, rather than the time constraint of an IM conversation.

Webinars and podcasts offer new possibilities that are exciting. A webinar allows many people to participate in an event or a speaker without being physically present. And if that gets archived so it can be accessed at a different time, too, making the information or speech or conference available to many more people. I have friends who rave about downloading podcasts to listen whenever they have time, or in the car, while running, etc. I am a very poor audio learner, however, and don't enjoy podcasts for the most part. While that is a skill I need to improve, for now it limits how often I am likely to use podcasts. I get tired of the pace of podcasts, for one thing. Some topics I am interested in, but don't want quite that much information! An article or a website can be skimmed, zooming in on most important information, rather than being forced into the pace of the podcast. For example, as I post this to my blog, I've had a podcast from the U of M about podcasting running in the background. It runs over half an hour! That's far more time than I want to commit to this. One area I truly like podcasts are for tours, a walking tour of a city or an exhibit tour at a museum.
I'm looking forward to moving on to a new thing. I've been "stuck" on this one for far too long.