There are 23 Things in this web challenge.  The 3rd was to start a blog, which as you can tell by reading this, I’ve already done.  The 2nd was to ruminate of the 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners.  (The 1st, if you’re wondering, was to sign up for the program.  I did that, thus staking my claim to that Wii.  That Wii with my name all over it.)  The 7 1/2 Habits detailed techniques for ensuring that you don’t stop learning after leaving school.  Librarianship is heavily reliant on learning new stuff — new resources, new technologies, new aspects to customer service, heck, even new approaches to reading (Wait, this comic book is read back-to-front?  And it’s not a comic book?) — so the librarian that stops learning is the one who is lost.  The assignment for this Thing was to identify which habit I excel at and which I need work on.

I found habit number 6, “Use Technology To Your Advantage”, to be the one that is probably easiest for me.  When I arrived in library school in the Fall of ‘04 I emailed regularly, did some online shopping, and surfed the web to get sports news a few hours a week.  Less than four years later I find myself admitting that I live my life online.  I no longer talk to friends on the phone, preferring email and IMing; I pay all my bills online; I do all my shopping online; all the news I consume is online; I spend the time I used to devote to reading books to follow (and participate in) a vibrant sports blogosphere.  During the 16 hours a day I’m awake, 13.5 of them are spent online (and 2 of the offline hours are spent in the car driving to and from work).  Using technology to my advantage is not a problem! 

What is sometimes a challenge is #2, “Accept Responsibility For Your Own Learning”.  When the topic to be learned is something I have interest in, I have no problem taking responsibility for learning it.  But if it’s something I’m not particularly interested in (like say, cataloging) I sometimes have difficulty motivating myself to learn on my own.