Must Read Books for Thinking About the Future from Stacey Aldrich

The Long Tail - Chris Anderson

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth - Juan Enriquez

The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman

Hesselbein on Leadership - Frances Hesselbein

The Art of Innovation - Tom Kelley

The Ten Faces of Innovation - Tom Kelley

The Age of the Spiritual - Ray Kurzweil

The singularity is Near - Ray Kurzweil

Strategic Foresight: the Power of Standing in the Future - Nick Marsh, et al

The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less - Barry Schwartz

The Art of the Longview - Peter Schwartz

Exercise #23: Reflections

My favorite discoveries on this learning journey were learning about sharing Word and Excel documents on the Internet. Now I have a virtual shared network. I'm trying Zoho for now and see how it works. I think that has some real potential for me.

I also like learning about Del.icio.us and how to tag bookmarks --that also will save some time so that my work bookmarks and my home bookmarks are the same. Having them organized without having to put them in folders will be nice.

I loved Rollyo search and being able to create my own searches that would be restricted to the websites that I'm interested in. Google search grabs everything, and sometimes I don't want everything.

I had no idea that there were Generators to create posters and calendars and games--no more creating my own Baby Shower games now that I have access to a Generator that will do that for me.

I can see that to be a lifelong learner of emerging technological innovations, I first need to know that there's something to learn. So I should subscribe to Wired or Web 2.0 managizes or get an RSS feed from the SJ Mercury on emerging technologies. Second, I have to make time to learn new technologies. Maybe it should be built into the work week like the Friday afternoon review. I had discovered Bloglines a couple of years ago and had set up some feeds, but after spending a few hours figuring it all out, I didn't take the time to regularly go back to make use of it. Then you forget your passwords and the time I spent learning didn't get fully utilized. I just need to realize that learning new technologies takes a lot of time and once mastered, if I don't incorporate them into my normal routine, I'll lose them. Third, I really prefer to learn from a book or training video. Learning online requires more hit and miss, "try this and see what happens" type of learning. I find that I get stuck and then I'm not sure how to proceed, or I don't really understand the power of the new technology until someone shares how they're using it with me.

I think that this program could be improved by completing it over 23 weeks instead of 9. One exercise a week would have been fine for me. Or even one new service a month. Learning out podcasting this month -- here's some websites to read, here's some training to go to, here's how to set it up, here's how to use it. I'm afraid that by going so quickly through this exercise, I really didn't have time at work to complete the projects and really explore as I would have liked.

I think eliminating the opening podcast on goals would be great. That exercise really gave me second thoughts about wanting to do this at all.

I think that the Bloglines exercise got too complicated and I'm not sure why. I think that I spent several hours on it, and because it came so early in the series, I thought that each one coming after would be even more confusing and time consuming. So it would be good to break that one up a bit, let people know that it was a hard one and that if they don't have time, they could skip to an easier one and come back to it.

Thanks for the opportunity to learn all of this and I look forward to what's coming next.

Exercise #22: ebooks

I liked learning about the various sites where ebooks are available for free. I knew that our King library had ebooks but I didn't know about the others. I didn't realize that there were so many current books available digitally. I'm not sure what it would be like to try to read a book from my computer - and I wondered about downloading Adobe's Reader 8.0 that would read the book outloud to me. That might be a nice feature for the car, once it gets Internet access.

Exercise #21 Podcasting.

Listen to a Podcast on using Web 2.0 in Libraries. I didn't know that podcasts had RSS feeds so that I could be updated when new podcasts become available. I also didn't know where to go besides iTunes to get lists of podcasts, so this exercise was great. I think that we should be using lots of podcasts since people have access to the wonderful presentations that are being given all over the world. We should be podcasting some of our programming as well.

Podcast.net
Podcastalley.com
Yahoo Podcasts

Exercise #20: YouTube

YouTube is awesome. I love being able to see clips from years gone by and find home videos of my children and world events. I think that being able to find or upload clips and then embed them so easily into my blog is a wonderful feature as well. No wonder this site has had the exponential growth it has.

You'll enjoy this YouTube video clip. It's from David Letterman's "Great Moments in Presidential Speaches" bit.

Exercise #19 LibraryThings

See what I'm reading these days at LibraryThing.com

Here's my list.

This is a great site where you can keep lists of the books that you love and let others see what you're reading. It also lets you connect with other people who are reading books that might be of interest to you as well.

Exercise #18 Online collaboration for documents and spreadsheets

I just created a document on the web so that you can go in and make changes. I used Zoho. A pretty nice tool. I think that I will definitely try out this option when I'm working with people from across California. In my work group we use a shared network drive -- I'm not sure if having documents on the web would be easier or not. We'llhave to give it a try.