Welcome!!

Welcome to the Orange County Library System Learn 2.0 Course!

The goals of the course are to provide you with an awareness of how our patrons are using technology and to provide you with an experience using some of the technology. This course will not qualify you as a Web 2.0 expert or any type of Technical Jedi, unless you already are one. You will have a chance to play with some new technology and hopefully have some fun doing it. My goal is to create an environment where you will be comfortable enough to try new things without any external pressures. To that goal, this is very much an informal learning experience; don’t be afraid to ask for help, work with a partner or to step outside of your box. We encourage all of those behaviors!!!!

To participate, simply dive into lesson number one. You don’t need to register or sign up, that process is built into the course. I will post the week’s topic every Tuesday afternoon. You can drop in and participate anytime your schedule allows. If you look at the course agenda on the course page, you can see that we will cover four weeks of material and then have a break. This break is to give you some breathing room or an opportunity to continue to explore, or even catch up. We will then pick it up again and run through weeks six through ten. At the end of the course, there are three weeks built in, again to give everyone a chance to catch up or finish up. I will start mailing the completer’s prize at the end of week ten and continue through week thirteen. At this point in time, I have no plans on removing any part of the course from the web, so you will always be able to access the content. However, the completer’s prize is only for a limited time.

To be eligible for the completers prize, you must complete the eXplore activities for each week and post your thoughts to your blog. I will provide an optional opportunity for additional exploration in the form of the Adventure activity. Again, this is completely optional. Some folks like more of a challenge, or like to explore, so this is their chance. You can do as many or as few Adventure activities as you want. I have classified the difficulty of each challenge with an orange rating system. One orange is the easiest through five oranges being the most difficult. I hope that you all try at least one!!!

This website has a couple of areas – the About section contains the licensing and credits information. The Course page contains the actual course, the agenda and the Department of Fun. The DoF is a list of websites that you can explore at your leisure. Think of it as the student union. We have assembled everything from movie trailers to chocolate chip cookie recipes for your browsing pleasure. The Glossary page is an interactive list of technical terms used in the course. You can add terms by using the comments link at the bottom of the page. We will add new words as they are requested.

Again, I am glad that you are here! Feel free to email me with any comments and have a good course!

Tom