THE LEARNING MAZE  

As I continue my blogging journey, I thought I'd take the time out to look back at the original learning goals I'd set myself in the first post, and see whether or not I have achieved any more of them. 

In my last learning goals post I discussed how I had become more comfortable with learning about and creating posts, well I can say for sure that I have definitely become much more proficient and confident with using Blogger's interface. Everytime I create a new post, I spend way too much time fiddling around with templates, layouts, fonts, colours and embedding gadgets and resources. I now have the ability to embed links, images and videos into a blog post - although I did have a fair amount of trouble with the formatting procedure of adding a caption to an image. After lots of swearing at Blogger, I finally figured it out and can now position, re-size and add captions like a pro! So, I think I can safely say that this particular learning goal has been well and truly accomplished.

Another learning goal that I was meaning to attempt was to communicate with my "buddy group". This I have done several times since my last post, however, I think I could still make more of an effort to engage with their blogs and start a dialogue about their current blogging activities. This will be a work in progress.

Most importantly though, I have managed to explore a lot of different tools and resources on Web 2.0 such as RSS Feeds and feed readers and how to subscribe to different news groups and access the latest news headlines and updates. I have also had the chance to learn about microblogging tools such as Twitter and Yammer by creating an account and becoming active in their respective communities. However, I need to tweet and yammer on a more regular basis as I have been a little apprehensive so far. I have also made a contribution to a collective resource by creating an account with Trove and have become involved in their digitised newspapers project by editing corrected text. One of the more frustrating experiences in my blogging journey so far has been my investigation of cloud storage providers. After doing a little research on cloud storage, I was ready to take the plunge, and after creating a "free" account with JustCloud, I was notified that I would have to pay for the service if I wanted to continue storing files. This was rather annoying as I felt I had been duped by their false advertising of "free infinite storage". Anyway, it was a lesson learned and I moved on and made the switch to Dropbox, which I found to be a much better provider.  

That's about as far as I have come in my blogging adventures. At times it has felt like a bit of a maze with so much information to absorb and learn, but I have had fun in creating and recording my insights into discovering various new technologies. I would like to think that I have made progress in terms of achieving most of my original learning goals. There are certainly a few improvements to be made, and other tools and resources to explore such as Endnote, social bookmarking sites and creating a mashup, but I'll save that for another time.

** My blog experience so far **
image taken from: http://designingquests.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/escher-relativity.jpg