23 Things on a Stick – Thing 23

I just submitted the survey that accompanies Thing 23 and once I’m done with this blog post, we are officially finished with 23 Things on a Stick.  (With one day to spare!)

The prompts for this post included mentioning what we learned, what Things were our favorites, and what could have been done differently with 23 Things.

We’ve learned that Web 2.0 applications really work best with a high-speed internet connection.  While more and more people are getting access to high-speed, we still have to be cognizant of the fact that not everyone does when we decide to adopt certain applications.  We’ve also learned that we can’t and shouldn’t adopt every Web 2.0 tool out there, and, boy, there are a lot.  We have to choose carefully from among the offerings and select things that we have time for and that seem to be a natural fit for our mission.

We had quite a few favorite Things, including blogging, Flickr, podcasting, Webinars, OPAL, and YouTube.  While I (Mary) love Bloglines for personal use, I find that I don’t have time to check in at work.  Ann Marie didn’t care for MySpace or Facebook because she felt as though she was prying into people’s private lives.  She liked Gather, though, because of its affiliation with an organization.

We enjoyed the entire concept of 23 Things on a Stick – the idea of making a commitment to try all sorts of online applications that are new to us.  Of course, once we learn these, there will be new applications developed that we’ll have to become familiar with.  The learning never stops.

The one thing we would have done differently with 23 Things is to break down a couple of the Things.  Specifially Thing 7 and 8 seemed to have way too many websites and applications to try.  We got bogged down at that point, which was almost half-way through, and thought that if the rest of the Things were this hairy, we were going to have serious trouble finishing.

The 23 Things on a Stick website is supposed to remain available indefinitely, so we’ll probably return to it as a resource.  The program was fun and we recommend you give it a try.