The Beginning

I sometimes suffer from 'Overactive Visual Imagination Syndrome' (technical term, OVIS) and the first image that popped into my head during class one of Document Management was a little hamster with broken teeth, floating around space while randomly bumping into various pieces of technological junk.

Then I re-focussed, and found myself both loving and being terrified of the course content. I really like that we are working with 'buddies' straight up, as it encourages social interaction and support while we have our heads mostly buried in our laptops.

I've had a bit of experience making blogs, and feel reasonably confident about using Blogger to maintain this record of my progress. It was easy to fix the privacy settings for this assignment, and I like adding photos to my posts.

However, I feel like I only have basic (at best) knowledge about the Web 2.0 world. My learning goals at this early stage:

1. I want to be able to intelligently articulate what all these new terms mean, and learn how to use them: microblogging, wikis, RSS, user-generated content, 'the cloud', social bookmarking.

2. I want to find out what the heck maps and mashups are.

3. I want to be at the cutting edge of all this technology so that professionally I feel confident as a user, and possibly even become able to teach others to use it to their advantage.

My guru guide book

I found a great book by Chandos Publishing called Do You Web 2.0? which I hope will give me more insight into the things we are learning. I already love that on the 'List of acronyms' at the start of this book, the first one listed is BFW - big frickin' wall. Speaking my language, Chandos!

There's also a great quote in the prologue that feels very relevant to the start of our journey:

'Maybe what we are going to learn out of this isn't some technological thing. Maybe what we're learning is to be more comfortable with a higher level of risk'.

                                            One step at a time, little hamster.