Regaining Momentum
Posted: Wed 01.25.2012 Filed under: Balance, Lived Experience Leave a commentTo compliment the “Distractions” posting by KRED, I thought it would important to mention not only distraction management, but the regaining of momentum following the holiday. As I am sure many people feel, you rush, rush, rush to get to the holidays, make sure that all gifts are bought and social events attended, you collapse in a heap after New Year’s and then it’s just… January. Some of us enjoy a month-long break. Others take the few days off for the holiday and get right back into it. I returned back to work on January 3rd, ready to tackle what I hope to be a productive Spring semester. Thus far, it has been exactly that. Unfortunately, it has meant that I have been not up to too much blogging and I’ve been a bit swamped. So, in honor of the crazy thus far, I wanted to get a little post up so I could help regain momentum. First, a video! And then I will explain my reasoning for including this:
Human-Based Percussion and Self-Similarity Detection in Electroacoustic Music from Anderson Mills on Vimeo.
Living in a Digital World, part 5 — Help me, Wikipedia! You’re my only hope.
Posted: Mon 01.23.2012 Filed under: Libraries, Research | Tags: community, global, information sharing, libraries, research, technology, tools Leave a commentAs you may have noticed, on Wednesday, 18 January 2012, Wikipedia didn’t work.
Image cc license from Flickr user brianjmatis: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7145/6723758731_f8a9f8c7ab_b.jpg
On Wednesday morning, I received one request from a colleague for clarification on why Wikipedia wasn’t available. For another user, I tried unsuccessfully to track down the posts I’d seen the previous day about how to make one’s blog go dark; the posts themselves were difficult to find because the blogs supporting them were on strike. For my own benefit, I found myself visiting sites I knew were down, simply to see what was up in place of the usual content. A couple library-themed online comics and most of the library-related blogs I follow had messages in protest and links to resources for learning more about the laws and contacting government representatives. I eagerly read the information posted on the website of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and thoroughly enjoyed the LOLcats protest video with appropriate lyrics set to the tune of Don McLean’s signature song “American Pie.”
Distractions
Posted: Mon 01.09.2012 Filed under: Balance | Tags: advice, cats, lived experience, methods, motivation, organization, time management, tips, tools Leave a comment
Image cc license from Flickr user pjmorse: http://farm1.staticflickr.com/212/500139740_5046965fa3_o.jpg
My distractions at this moment:
- Cars passing and the fact that, though the streets are dry, it sounds like the roads are wet
- Someone playing video games in the other room
- The cats, one trying to sleep on my lap between me and the laptop perched at my knees, the other staring at me from the floor by my feet
- The plethora of other things I’m supposed to accomplish today
- The Internet
The cat in my lap has now moved to sleep on my wrists. Obviously, she doesn’t see this as a distraction; in her mind, it’s the computer and whatever I’m typing that must be distracting me from what I should be doing, namely, paying attention to her. When she gets really irritated, she puts her paws across my hand and flexes her claws, then turns to stare at my over her shoulder with that look that cats have perfected, a cross between boredom, disdain, and eye-rolling irritation. This post, ladies and gentlemen, is apparently less important than this furball.
In the book The Secret Miracle: The Novelist’s Handbook, on the topic of distractions and handling them, the responses from two different authors express very well the delicate balance in dealing with distractions.
Grad School for Beginners
Posted: Thu 01.05.2012 Filed under: Libraries, Lived Experience, Tips | Tags: distance education, graduate school, libraries, new students Leave a comment
Image Courtesy of Flickr User Jason Verwey
“A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.” – Lao Tzu
Graduate school is a large life decision that can both enrich your life and frustrate you. Like our friend Lao Tzu alludes, it’s not the pursuit of comfort that you exercise by entering graduate school, but the pursuit of knowledge. As I put the close on this semester and look back, I think about how many challenges and triumphs we had this Fall. For one, my husband recently completed his first semester of graduate studies. Now, I have been a student or worked in an academic environment for the last 11 years, so I took for granted the struggle of a professional coming back to school for the first time in a decade. In this blog post, I want to give a little “Grad School for Beginners” for those who might be needing a little refresher in the basics. Some of you may be seasoned veterans who are teaching a class for the first time,. I hope this post serves as a good starting point for your students. For others, you may be dipping your toe in the grad school waters, taking a class this Spring semester. As we get ready to get back in to the swing of things, here are some of the best lessons and resources that I’ve learned to help get you through it.
Pre-Holiday Library Lessons Learned
Posted: Mon 01.02.2012 Filed under: Libraries | Tags: advice, libraries, lived experience, organization, technology, tips Leave a comment
Image cc license from Flickr user tigerlillyshop: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7145/6578988197_eccb05d7c4_b.jpg
‘Twas the last Friday before the holidays
and silence reigned in the stacks.
There were no patrons nor queries,
not a call, e-mail nor fax.
The books were all shelved
in their places with care
in hopes that, undisturbed,
they would stay there…
(with apologies to Clement C. Moore)
For some libraries, the holiday season means a massive rush to the finish, followed be peace and calm and an opportunity for inventory, staff training, and wearing jeans to work. In the last week before the holiday break, there were some important lessons learned which I thought might bear sharing as they apply for librarians and library patrons, beyond this stressful period and into the rest of the year.
Happy Holidays from Research Salad!
Posted: Wed 12.21.2011 Filed under: Balance | Tags: holiday Leave a commentFrom all of us here at Research Salad, we wish you and your family all the best this holiday season. From Kwanzaa to Chanukah to Christmas to Winter Solstice: no matter what you are celebrating, we hope that it is joyous. Thank you for reading our blog and we hope to keep posting interesting things for you to read in 2012. Here’s to a prosperous and happy new year to you all!
Tech tools and tryability
Posted: Sat 12.17.2011 Filed under: Research, Tools | Tags: qualitative, tools Leave a comment
Image courtesy of Black & Decker
Recently, I blogged about analyzing qualitative interview data. Using a constant comparative method, themes emerged upon multiple readings of the data. Done by hand, the process was laborious, time-consuming, and highly instructive. In other words, I learned a lot. However, as in other areas of life (electric screw drivers, anyone?) having the right tool for the job can save an enormous amount of time, not to mention muscle power. Time and energy that might be spent in better ways, say in writing up the analysis or catching up on your professional reading, or even polishing off the last of your online Christmas shopping. So when I received over 50 pages of newly transcribed interview data, I decided it might be time to investigate tech tools to do the job more efficiently, even more precisely.
Tackling the Funding Question
Posted: Thu 12.15.2011 Filed under: Lived Experience, Research | Tags: funding, grants Leave a comment
I love the quote that is underneath the photo to the left. And I loved it when my advisor told me that I would “miss 100% of the buses I didn’t try to catch.” This seems like an apt metaphor for the funding game and the confidence hump that we must all get over in order to recognize our work is “worth it”. I recently submitted a small, within-university grant for a pilot project I want to test. However, when it came time to put the proposal together, my enthusiasm started to wane What if the proposal isn ‘t what they are looking for? How likely was it really that I would get the grant? I felt myself talking my way out of applying bit by bit.
Living in a digital world, part 4 — tech product reviews
Posted: Mon 12.12.2011 Filed under: Tools | Tags: advice, information sharing, lived experience, research, technology, tools Leave a comment
Image cc license from Flickr user: Tim Caynes (http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5047/5228886276_42ed9fe1b5_b.jpg)
One afternoon, a staff member came into the library with an unusual request. For her upcoming holiday, instead of escaping to a beach or the mountains, she had decided to try something a little different. She would be traveling to South Africa and donate her time to a project tagging penguins on a wildlife reserve. She had already borrowed books on penguins and made an appointment to visit a local zoo and speak with those specializing in animal care. Now, all she needed was a camera.
Her previous camera was not up to the trip and she was looking for something a little more advanced, with a different feature set. She did not want to know what camera I would recommend for her, but rather where she should look to find information to help her make her decision. Where could she find reviews of various products, created by experts and everyday people, to enable her to make an informed choice?
Parrhesia: Academic bold speak
Posted: Sat 12.10.2011 Filed under: Reflection | Tags: advocacy, discourse, racism Leave a commentWORD POWER Words are one of a teacher’s most powerful tools. Like tools, they can be wielded to construct, disassemble, or repair. Israeli born educator and psychologist, Haim Ginott’s most famous quote on the relationship between teachers and students included the lines,
“It is my daily mood that makes the weather.
As a teacher I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous.
I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration.
I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.”
Ginott’s work centered mostly on younger children and teenagers. His book Between Parent and Child, originally published in 1965, drew on his work with troubled adolescents in Jacksonville, Florida, and emphasized the need to combine compassion with boundary setting. Of course, compassion and her sister, kindness, serve a teacher well at any stage of a student’s development. Parrhesia, or bold speaking, may serve a teacher better when a student is a little older or when the relationship is already strong enough to withstand some shaking.
Research Salad 