After ETL 501

Before ETL 501

·        I was a luddite. (I still am. I can’t use a mobile phone without remedial instruction from my teenage daughter, I broke my other daughter’s tape recorder and I can’t program the DVD recorder.)

·        I Googled 100% of the time.

·        I thought Wikipedia wasn’t too dodgy.

·        I thought a domain was a tunnel.

·        I had never heard of a pathfinder.

·        I thought tweets were noises birds made.

·        I thought Delicious was a reference to Black Forest Cake.

·        I took notes in an exercise book.

·        I used a print dictionary

After ETL 501

·        I regularly use Bing and Dogpile, and I encourage my children to do likewise. I think of keywords before I search and I use AND or OR or maybe NOT.

·        I avoid Wikipedia, and if I do use it, I triangulate for confirmation of facts.

·        I check domain names before I click on a hit and when looking at a website I search around for dates and author's names and copy down URLs exactly.

·        I have made my first pathfinder and guess what? It’s a wiki. It was so much fun I look forward to making hundreds more.

·        I muddle around with Twitter every day. I have learnt to tweet and how to respond to someone else’s tweet. I only have a handful of followers, but hey, it’s early days yet for this luddite.

·        I have saved a bunch of interesting things from the Web onto my Delicious site. I have an Information Technology tag, a Pasifika tag, a Maths tag etc...

·        I have learnt to take e-notes which made doing assignments kind of detached but workable.

·        I have a list of more things to conquer, chiefly Informit, Weebly, Animoto, Flickr, Wylio and Scootle.

·        As for my other life as an author, ETL501 has made me determined to make a few book trailers and to self-publish some short stories as ebooks using Smashwords.

Thanks Barbara for pushing me into the deep end. I may be spluttering and gasping for air but I think I’ll be able to tread water soon.

Oh, I still use a print dictionary. The spine’s broken and the pages are dog-eared, but it smells familiar and holds memories of scrabble games long gone. It’s one thing technology can never replace.