23-1/2 things

I have enjoyed the program and learned a great deal.

The upside: I wasn't as technologically illiterate as I thought I was.
The downside: the pace of the program didn't allow me to really absorb the material. One thing a week for 6 months might have worked out better for my particular learning style.

An important adjunct would be continuing to keep the 23-1/2 things posted somewhere, or downloadable from somewhere, for future reference. I've had occasion to refer to some of the things we worked on, but there were so many, I couldn't quite remember which site was which. I was able to reference this site to jog my memory. I would have been lost without it.

I would absolutely participate in a similar program again.

audiobooks

I have long loved audiobooks for when I travel, and in the past couple of years, we've gotten a reasonably good collection of downloadables. The construction of the site makes it difficult to browse, which is how I would ideally find what I'd like to hear but I know that is a function of the Overdrive software and that QL has little/no control over that.

I came across a title, "The Saturdays," that was a favorite children's book when I was young. I will make it a point to listen, just to see if it's the same book.

Podcasts

I have been familiar with podcasts, so there's nothing revolutionary here for me. There is plenty of interesting content around, you simply need the time to anticipate what you will want to hear in the future and add it to your account.

Prior to the wide availability of podcasts, I had rigged a casette recorder hooked up to a timer and radio so I could get a few favorite radio shows when I wasn't home to hear them. This is much simpler.

YouTube

YouTube is both a resource and the world's biggest time waster, not only in the time it takes to view the postings, but the time that people spend filming their pets snoring or their babies drooling, and then posting them to YouTube.

There is a lot of valuable content that will become more valuable as time goes on. We can now see presidential speeches and academy award presentations. The grandparents of the drooling babies are certainly delighted to be able to watch whenever they want.

A drawback to the site is that you can't really tell what's genuine and what's a parody. I watched a video of what was supposed to be a Fox newscast of a sane-looking man going on about Bill Clinton and UFOs. Either it was a parody, or Fox News should have their license revoked for airing such inanities -- but I can't really tell you which.

You can put any two unrelated words into the search engine, and get multiple hits, testifying to the unbelievable quantity of material posted. A sterling example was a video of people who were trying to whitewater raft on blow-up anatomically-correct dolls, and another of students trying an experiment by bouncing a basketball off a high place with an egg atop it (the result of the search terms "library" and "egg.")

If I were an anthropoligist in the year 3007 and I dug up YouTube, I would conclude that people in 2007 were unapologetic exhibitionists. Like bloggers :-)