How About Some Learn & Play? Thing#23: Skidoo

The End, originally uploaded by Dill Pixels.

So this is it.  The final chapter of my Learn & Play experience. It’s been a cool ride.  I’ve enjoyed blogging way more than I expected to.  Twitter, flickr, tumblr, The Google Reader — all well integrated into my daily life at this point.  It’s hard to recall now, how I experienced the web before this initiative.

My Learn & Play experience began with The Hyperlinked Library kickoff down at Main, to which I traveled with one of the cool kids.  She was hip to most of this stuff, knew of Michael Stephens & of what he spoke, you know she was plugged in.  Me, I was out of the loop.  & for a guy who mildly likes to believe he’s kinda with it, that was disconcerting.  I was feeling my age, GEN X, a full-on Spectator along with 41% of my peers.  The world was passing me by, and I was content to watch.

But I’m a creator, I said to myself.  Haven’t I’ve been half-assedly writing a book (or two) for the last 10+ years?  So this chart, set the challenge for me.  I wanted to be in that top tier.  I wanted to be part of the conversation that was taking place.  I wanted to be part of the world.

(If I am grateful to Learn & Play for one thing (aside, of course, from Twitter), it’s that it got me writing again.)

There were some downsides to the experience.  Honestly, I don’t know if I would have finished if I were not exempt, and thus enabled to do “work” off the clock, at home, with no fear of violating any murky federal work/compensation laws.  I’d be interested to know how much of Learn & Play was actually able to be completed by staff on the clock. 

I’d also be interested in seeing some participation statistics after this thing wraps.  Was participation affected by things like size of the branch, information staff vs circulation staff, part time vs full time, high circulation vs low circulation, high users visits vs low user visits, PSD vs non-PSD, etc. 

As alluded to by some other people, there were definitely a lot of haters out there, who just weren’t buying into the Learn & Play experience on any level.  That was difficult for staff who were enthusiastic to deal with, the vocal, dissaproving minority.

I’m excited by the fact that even at the end of this, Learn & Play will remain a good vehicle to use to train staff in these emerging tools of librarianship.  They may not be eligible to win one of the amazing prizes, but knowledge is its own reward, right?

& as they are fond of saying, it’s never too late to get started.