The process of participating in 23 things has been very good for me in order to keep up with new and emerging technologies. It has been good to have to think beyond the needs of our own work environment to try to envisage how these technologies will impact on or be able to be used by the university.

I have learned to create and maintain a blog, use RSS feeds and use podcasting. I plan to maintain the usage of podcasts on my newly acquired Ipod. The RSS feeds are already being used and considered for wider usage in the university and the library, I personally find multiple RSS feeds as a blizzard of information sometimes repetitive and useful if you like to skim.

I believe students today would make use of most of what we have experienced in doing the 23 things and will probably expect them to be used in a learning environment. Larning has become more about the individual and the digital technologies are ideal for individual learning although the social networking aspects keep individuals in contact with others. The digital environment means a greater reach for information gathering and integration. It is also cost effective to learn and teach digitally and learning is happening all the time. the responsibility for learning may now lie with the individual and the use of digital technologies will allow the greatest disemination of information.

I have chosen the site Medstory from the list of Web 2.0 award nominees to examine. I chose a topic that I had done other general research for recently on the web.
Medstory was OK with clear though rather brief entries, I suppose neccesarily not too detailed due to the target audience being the general population. In comparison with academic medical journals, it was of course far easier to read and understand but left me wanting more information.

There are a substantial number of links to various other sites which were useful and informative and the links occurred without difficulty.

For a public library this would be an excellent resource but I would have thought that for an academic library it would serve as a first base stepping off point for the development of knowledge about a particular health issue.

One of the links spotted was to Medline which is a database listed in the ECU library catalogue. National bodies also appear as links, so Mestory is good in that respect.