Thoreau Fragment Assignments

Here are links to the two fragments which I have also included in my home page:

Thoreau fragment using inline styling

Thoreau fragment using external style sheet

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.