Thing46: WebJunction Minnesota

Good grief. AWOL for a month. Oh well - I may not finish but I'm choosing a few of the remaining nine items.

I had an account w/WebJMN already, but looked it over well. The online courses are most valuable. I would like to learn Dreamweaver and this seems to be the place to do it. However, the "self-paced" gave me pause, considering that I didn't stick to More Things all that well. Nonetheless, the "FREE" is a tremendous benefit to librarians. Ironically, I decided to go to library school when I realized that I'd have to learn a lot of programs to continue in the printing prepress field. I figured if I had to go back to school, I was going to go do something new that I wanted to do. Interesting that I can now learn Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop for free on WebJunction!

My only complaint is that it is difficult to determine which classes in a series (e.g. Dreamweaver) to take first. Multiple classes in a software program should be listed in suggested order of completion. I didn't see a "getting started with Dreamweaver" - so does that mean I should be familiar with the program? The prerequisities are daunting - familiarity with HTML and building web pages, yes, but XML and Javascript? If I knew that well enough I wouldn't be looking to complete a Dreamweaver course.

The calendar of events and friends are just more overlap for me. I get notifications of courses via email in triplicate and participate in FaceBook and LinkedIn sites. Enough.

The groups are not geared to small, specialized libraries. Guess I'd have to START a group? Overall, this is a wonderful resource. It's that TIME thing - I know I should take those free online classes but am working on my discipline to do so. Maybe that's what fees do for you?