In Closing

I had very little expectations going into this course.  I knew I wanted to take a Maymester course my last year and this one fit the bill.  A coworker of mine went through the Valdosta program and said he really enjoyed this class.  But I had no idea the kinds of things we would be learning or the amount of work that would be involved.

Oh boy, was I in for a ride.

I have learned about everything from social media campaigns to website design to wikis to trying to wrap my mind around semantic web.  I have a blog, a Twitter, a website, and a poster to show for my efforts, as well as a group of friends I got to know very well "in the trenches" of Twitter late at night as we all struggled to finish our assignments alongside each other.

The only thing I would have done differently about this course would be to make it a full length summer course and to add a bit more material.  I know it sounds crazy, but the compact nature of this course actually helped me focus a bit more on the subjects for each week, but maybe spreading it out a bit more would help me enjoy it in the moment more.  As for topics, I would love to have been able to talk about some of the more library-specific technologies that are popular in libraries currently - such as Electronic Resource Management software or Discovery layers.  I realize these probably have their own course and that's why we didn't cover them, but all the same while we were on that path, let's dive in!  I also wish we had been able to get a bit more into website development and had more time to really make our sites shine - maybe have a period of a "rough drafting", followed by instructor and classmate feedback, and then a polished "final product" stage.

All in all, I have enjoyed this Maymester experiment and wish you all a happy summer!  I'll be taking Academic Libraries if anyone wants to "hang out" again :)

See you around!

- Ashley