The End is Near

I'll have finished one semester of grad school by the end of this week. Hooray! It has been very challenging in terms of time management but very stimulating. I really do enjoy being a student again. My coworkers who said that the courses would be a breeze because I "already know it all" after years of library experience were wrong. I have been living in my own little corner of the world; apart from sharing a little of my experience in online discussions, everything has been new!

Here's my partial "to do" list for the three weeks between semesters. (Unfortunately, I can't take any time off from work!):

• Get 7-8 hours of sleep per night.
• Spend time with my niece and nephew. I miss them so much!
• Get 7-8 hours of sleep per night.
• Take my mother on the day trip she should have had on her birthday in June.
• Get 7-8 hours of sleep per night.
• Have dinner with a friend who celebrated a milestone birthday earlier this month. (You know who you are!)
• Get 7-8 hours of sleep per night.
• Figure out how to fully staff my library on Saturdays in September with two fewer people until we hire and train.
• Get 7-8 hours of sleep per night.
• Practice with PowerPoint.
• Get 7-8 hours of sleep per night.

Well, you get the idea.

Slashdot

I just learned about Slashdot from reading Infotopia, (by Cass R. Sunstein), so I decided to take a look at it. Since my father suffered from Parkinson's Disease, and a cousin has cerebral palsy, this article caught my eye. (Slashdot is also discussed in more detail by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks.)


Slashdot The Future of Putting Chips Inside Our Brains

Technical Difficulties

Before I left for my on-campus visit, I was rather pleased with the images I had placed on my personal home page. I had been surprised by how easy it was for me to move the images from their sources to my page. HA! I knew it was too easy. In the discussion board, I learned that by simply copying an image location and pasting it into Kompozer, I was using the original page's bandwidth. Instead, I should save the images in a folder of my own before using them. This was confirmed when I checked with my brother, my personal consultant for all of these things! (I still think that I was following the instructions in Kompozer's help section when I did it my way.)

I deleted my images. That made it look like I hadn't been working on my page, so I added a note about my need to redo this in the discussion thread that would be seen by my professor.

Anyway, it took me a long time last night to get this right. I finally succeeded. Now it's time to find out why the RSS feed that I inserted hasn't updated!

Kuhn (Reprise)

Like many of my classmates, my reaction to our first assignment to read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn, was "Why?" That was followed by "An MLIS? What was I thinking?" Gradually, I have been seeing the significance of the work. The phrases scientific revolution and paradigm shift keep popping up in other required texts. Most recently, Tim O'Reilly discusses Kuhn in his article entitled "The Open Source Paradigm Shift", one of the entries in Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software. Also, I just finished reading Linked, by Barabasi, who also uses Kuhn's terms in his book.

Even though reading Kuhn's book was a struggle, I now appreciate how his ideas are incorporated in the works of other authors to this day. Now, when I read the phrases he coined, I think of Kuhn's book (even when his name is not mentioned).

I never thought I'd say this, but I now know why we had to read it!

New Friends

I completed my six-day on-campus requirement today. It was exhausting yet exciting. I am so glad that I chose this program. The cohort concept and the chance to meet the people with whom you will graduate are definitely very strong features. We represent a wide age range, but everyone blended so easily. Getting to know everyone informally as well as through this week's assignments has been a wonderful experience. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone again in October. In the meantime, we agreed that our online discussions will be enriched as a result of this time together.

Personal Home Page

I've completed about half of the requirements for my home page. In fact, I finished the portion that was due on July 8 on that day. However, there's some confusion about where we should post the link. I've suggested a separate discussion board where we can each do so. I don't want the assignment to be considered late, but I also don't want to post it in my blog. I added a new thread to the Kompozer DB and posted it there. I'm leaving for the long drive to the university tomorrow, so I wish I knew what to do about this.

Update! As soon as I finished this post, I went back to the Kompozer DB. A new DB was just created for this assignment.

Blessings

I received a card from my best friend yesterday. It has a butterfly on the front with the words "Flitter, Flutter, not a care...hope today will take you there!" Paul's words from Phillippians 4:19 are also included: "You can be sure that God will take care of everything you need..." (The Message).

She knows how difficult it has been to complete my assignments on time, work full-time, and take care of my mother. So far, I don't get much sleep, but things are going rather well.

I haven't been able to see my friend since the week before the beginning of the term; we haven't even called or e-mailed each other much. We're both so busy.

However, I think she senses that I'm getting very anxious about the long drive to the campus on Friday. I'm going to keep her card on the seat beside me and then in my pocketbook as I go through the on-campus experience.

She is such a blessing.

Almost Time to Travel

On Friday, I'll stop sitting in front of my computer and will instead sit behind the wheel for about six hours and drive to the university campus for a required visit. I'm looking forward to this (the visit, not the driving) for a number of reasons. For one thing, it will be great to meet the people that I know only from the course discussion boards and lecture videos. I was told by friends who take online courses that personalities come through on the DBs, and it's true. My cohort members, professors, and teaching assistant are all friendly, helpful people, and I'm looking forward to spending time with them.

Getting ready for this experience is a challenge. I've had a lot to do at work in preparation for being away for more than a week, and I still have a lot of reading to do for Understanding Information. I wanted to have my car with me, but now I wonder if I should have bought a plane ticket so I wouldn't lose all that reading time.

Also, I'm very concerned about my weekly assignments for the technology course. I'm keeping up, but will I be able to finish this week's installment before I leave? I need my laptop for it, and we've been told not to bother bringing laptops. Does that mean that the assignment is not really due until after we return home and that the time frames are only guidelines? Our professor and teaching assistant have been strangely silent this week. I think they're watching and waiting as we figure these things out for ourselves within our class.

Online LIS

I've been meaning to share this article about studying for my MLIS online. Even though I'm sleep deprived, I feel that I chose the right program. I don't feel the sense of isolation that the author describes. In fact, classmates' postings on the various discussion boards are very helpful. I'm looking forward to meeting other people when we meet on-campus for a week. This is a great component of the program.

The teacher/trainer in me wants to help others via the DB far more than I have been. Hopefully, this will be possible as I get more experience with the technology. I have a big fear of leading someone astray with wrong information right now. I need to be more confident. Also, by the time I near the completion of an assignment (usually on the due date!), I assume that no one needs any more help!

The Online LIS Experience - 4/15/2007 - Library Journal

Koha -- Virtual Shelves

Books about library personnel management that I cataloged using Koha.

Koha -- Virtual Shelves

I'm wondering if this is an acceptable way to post the titles. I was trying to find an easy way to do this without typing the eighteen titles in my blog. The problem with this method is that it requires a Koha log-in. I'll wait in case more instructions come along. If not, I think I should start typing!

An update (July 8) for the thousands of readers of my blog who don't have a Koha account: Please see the title list under my ZoomCloud (and just in case this is the preferred method of posting the assignment).

Encyclopedia of Life

I watched a fascinating episode of "Bill Moyers Journal" tonight during which Moyer interviewed E.O. Wilson of Harvard. Wilson's dream is to create the Encyclopedia of Life, which he describes as "the key tool we need to inspire preservation of the earth's biodiversity." The project is an expandable and accessible website that will catalog every species of living thing (1.8 million species!). Scientists as well as amateurs will be able to contribute, and the information will be viewable in different formats so that it will be useful to everyone from children to experts.

It is hoped that key parts of the Encyclopedia will be available to the general public in 2008 and that the project will be completed in about ten years.

Bill Moyers Journal . E.O. WILSON | PBS

Encyclopedia of Life

First Online Quiz

I took a quiz online for the first time on Tuesday morning (for Introduction to Information Technologies). The experience was a bit nerve-wracking - because of technology itself, not the content of the quiz. Before I turned on the computer, I noticed that the cable modem lights were not "right." I decided to wait a little before trying to reset. I used the time to continue to review. What if I didn't get an Internet connection in time? The computers at the closest public library are on the same network as the library where I work. The so-called "speed" is often incredibly slow. Whose computer could I borrow this morning? I calmed down, and the lights returned.

I had been merrily clicking on "save" after finishing each question. All of a sudden, the screen froze. Now what? Again, I decided to calm down and wait. Finally, I was able to continue to work.

When I checked the course announcements during my dinner break at work that evening, I learned that some people had been unable to submit their tests. I put myself in their places and realized that my morning had been relatively good! Our professor made adjustments for the problems, of course.

Now I just have to wait for my grade!

ZoomClouds URL

I posted my ZoomCloud on my blog by the due date, thinking that this indicated the URL. Now I'm wondering, based on what some classmates have posted on the DB. After trying various URLs that I see in ZoomClouds, it seems that this is the only one that actually shows anything. However, it does not show the variety of tags that are in my cloud.

I changed the Archive in "View Feed Properties" to the maximum. Hopefully, that will create an improvement in the next update.

http://mpoly.suprglu.com/feed/rss20/supr.xml

Update (August 1, 2007): After reading a posting on the DB, I might finally understand what I should have posted as the URL for my ZoomCloud.

http://zoomclouds.egrupos.net/CircSuper_Cloud/viewCloud/12193

Clouding up Again

I went into Templates, clicked on Edit for the page element corresponding to my cloud. As I mentioned in the previous post, the HTML code was still there. I clicked on Save Changes, and the cloud returned to my blog.

ZoomCloud Floated Away!

OK, what's going on?

My cloud disappeared from my blog, but the HTML is still in the template. When I just went to the site to investigate, it was in Spanish again!

ZoomClouds

I've posted my cloud, but after a lot of work, I'm not happy with it. I tried feedblendr and suprglu. Both picked up phrases from my blog postings, not just the labels. I filtered out a bunch of them. The good thing is that I see tags from all three feeds (blog, Connotea, and del.icio.us.

There's a problem with ZoomClouds when you try to reload your cloud after editing. (And that's not the only problem!)