Close to the end

I’ve been working on my EdD for the last three years. All my life has been work and school, school and work. Along the way, things have happened. Good things, bad things, things I don’t know the significance of yet. But, all along the way, the march has been forward.

Tonight, I think that sometimes the march isn’t forward. The way is not straight. Time is not linear. Value is not clear. The path I was on is about to end. I defend my dissertation on Tuesday. As I’ve been telling people, if all goes well, I walk in a student, I walk out an EdD.

That means something to me. It means the end of a long, hard path.

It also means the beginning. What will life be for me without school? I haven’t built a community here – well, apart from school. I haven’t found a family here. When I lived in Oak Park, IL and in Worcester, MA, I was a part of Unitarian Universalist communities. Here, I haven’t found one that suits me; one that meets my needs. I haven’t found my niche. I haven’t made the kind of friends that have staying power. Friends that I can be with and who can be with me.

So, there’s lots of things ahead. Not just the graduation. Real life things ahead. I need to make some decisions. One of them is about this house that I’ve lived in for that last 5 years. Sell or stay? And then there is the whole question of what do you do when you don’t have a paper due? What do you do when you’re not re-writing the dissertation? How will you manage your life?

When I was in sixth grade, I got an autograph book. It was small. I remember handing it to my father. He wrote something in there that’s followed me my whole life. He wrote: “When will you try to be – when will you want to be – just Donna all the time?”

Unfortunately, he died before I was old enough to talk to him & understand what he meant by that.

And here I am, still trying to figure out what it means to be just Donna all the time.

Another journey. Another adventure.

In the midst

Here I am, in the middle of writing a dissertation…Oh, lordy. The amount of work I have to do. I was totally unprepared for it. But, I have to say, I’ve learned a lot. Really. Personally, I’m surprised to say that. I have been in other educational programs and, frankly, I thought it was a hoop-jumping thing. “We will give you this degree if you do this and this and this.” I jumped. I’ve been programmed to jump. This time around, though, I have to say it’s different. Yes, I’m jumping through hoops. But, I’m learning something, too. I’ve learned about pedagogy and andragogy. I’ve listened to the students who have been in our program – what they remember, what they learned, what they wanted to learn. And, from it all, I’ve learned that librarians don’t understand medical students. We don’t understand them as people and we don’t understand, really, their learning needs. We don’t get it. Everyone – well, everyone in library-land – is wondering how we make ourselves more relevant to the educational mission. I have one suggestion and it’s a no-duh thing: talk to the people you teach. Talk to them. Learn what they think about what they need to know.

Life is short and, in medical school, time is at a premium.

If you want to make an impact – talk with the people you teach. Whether it’s faculty or students or whoever.

Talk to them.

It’s the only way we’ll be able to figure out how to make a difference.

That’s one thing I’ve learned in this whole process. Learn how to do a focus group. Set aside money in the library budget to do that (and have food) and then, learn how to make meaning out of what is said in the process. You can benefit from that.

I am working through coding transcripts of focus groups and interviews. There’s so much to be learned.

Somehow, I will make sense of this for our particular program. Maybe some of what I learn will be of use to other programs. Maybe not.

But, I’ve learned this one thing: talk to the people you teach. Learn what they think about it apart from the immediate feedback on survey questions. Meet them where they are. And continue to meet them in those places where our intervention would be useful.

I wonder…. all of what we do…. where does it go? Who benefits? Who thinks it was worthwhile? We need to know.

There’s so much we need to know.

There’s so much I need to do.

Looking for completion.

Looking for significance.

Life is a journey. And we’re all on it….

Traces of snow

Woke up this morning to traces of snow clinging to places that are slow to warm up: the leaf pile at the curb in the front yard; the cover of the gas grill; the globes on the deck lamps. It always makes me feel a bit nostalgic. It makes me miss Minnesota.

Missing Minnesota is something beyond place. It was home to me when I was a child and as I grew up, so it represents comfort and acceptance and the warmth of family. I am many miles away from Minnesota now, geographically and emotionally. Some days, I miss it more than others. Today’s one of those days.

 

 

Group Projects and learning

So, everything today is supposed to be about student “learning” rather than the banking model of education (drive up, get “knowledge deposit”, drive away). But, I have to say that I’m a bit concerned about all that. If I pay over $3,000 for a single course in a graduate program, do I really want to just sit around for an entire semester and listen to my peers talk? Or do I really want to hear from experts?

I can teach myself a lot of things.

When I pay money to become more “educated”, to LEARN something, I’m not paying for the opportunity to read the textbook and teach it to someone else. I’m paying to learn from someone who knows more than I do.

I find this whole notion of “learning” very confusing.

Group projects for adults who are working over 40 hours every week, have partners and/or families, and are taking one or more courses in the hopes of completing a graduate degree and improving their lives — it’s craziness. There’s no time to get together. There’s no time to meet. There’s no time to really plan a “group” project. And this adds a layer of stress that ensures that limited LEARNING is taking place. We’re all just trying to get by.

I’ve hated group projects as part of “education” as long as I’ve had to do them.

I’ve really hated them while I’ve watched my children and other kids do these in middle school and high school. It seems that some kids work hard at these, others do nothing, and all get the grades the hard workers earned. Is that fair?

Oh well….I guess it’s the way of education.

And I guess I still have a lot to learn.

The wrong side of the (life) track

Things are becoming clearer to me by the day.

Ageism. Trust me. It’s something you won’t think about until it slaps you in the face. You live with it and you don’t notice it until its gone. It’s like white people and racial privilege.

You’re young. You live with this youth privilege for quite a long time. Years, really. It’s so much a part of your life that you don’t even think about it or realize you’re living with it. And then, in what feels like an instant, you realize you’re on the outside looking in.

You’re not the valued demographic any longer. You’re one of the “old” people.

It happens. I remember my mother telling me that the hardest part of growing old was not the reading glasses or the hearing aid, the silver hair or the wrinkles. It was becoming invisible. She told me she would approach clerks in stores who would act as if she were not there, passing over her to serve some younger person.

It’s been said that anyone 15 years older than you is an “elder.” I don’t know about that. I do know that the outside boundary of “middle age” has been slowly adjusted as I have grown older.

It happens.

When I realized, though, that it was my own professional organization that was idealizing ageism, I really had to stop and think. My professional association is the Medical Library Association. I’m a librarian in an academic medical center. At our last annual meeting, there was definite ageism. I am no longer the valued demographic in my own profession. Incredibly, those who are young among us have automatically gained the patina of being smarter, more tech savvy, and more future-minded than any of us old folks.

I take issue with that. Many librarians are 2nd career librarians. They come from all sorts of other backgrounds, drawn to librarianship by whatever mysterious callings. The point, though, is not the chronological age of the person. The point is that they are NEW to this career, bringing with them the hopes and dreams that people bring to a new profession. Furthermore, they bring skills with them.

Many librarians who have been working in this profession for decades are more future-minded than younger librarians. I know. I know them. Many of them are the people who have brought this profession to where it is today.

Who are we kidding? Not all young people are tech-savvy. Not all old people are tech-ignorant. Those are blatant stereotypes.

No profession survives without a constant influx of practitioners. We need young people joining our ranks. We also need those second-career people joining us.

No profession survives by making its long-term members invisible.

There’s a middle road where age is a non-issue. I prefer that. I want to learn from people of all ages in my professional life. I want to contribute whether I am young or old. I want to be respected for what I contribute. I want to respect others, regardless of age, for their contributions, also.

And I don’t want to have to pretend to be younger than I am so that I can continue in my chosen profession.

I want to be up there, banging on the tambourine as long as I can still hear the music.

But, I am reminded of a professional mentor who told me the following: “Dye your hair. They won’t look twice at someone with gray hair.”

And my mother who said: “Dye your hair. You’re making me look old.”

Gotta go. Happy trails.

All Good Things….

And this is the last homework assignment.

Today’s topic: mashups.

Wow. This was fun territory to poke around in.

I absolutely LOVED the Star Viewer mashup where you can look at a star map and then, as you click on constellations, a video pops up and you can see very, very cool pictures of the galaxy or the nebula or whatever.

And I found myself really being pulled into Twistori where you can read tweets containing the words: I love, I hate, I think, I believe, I feel and I wish. Believe me, this is so much more interesting than it sounds.

There was a 24-hour services mashup which I could have used on Friday, April 11th, as I was driving thru Vermont at 3:00 am and desperately hoping to find a 24-hour gas station off 89 en route to Burlington. (But, in all honesty, the mashup wouldn’t have helped because it didn’t cover VT.)

Knowledge discovery will take different pathways. Mashups may be one of those pathways. I believe this is possible.

What I am having trouble with, however, is the idea that your average librarian will be doing the mashing-up. It could happen, I know. I sure won’t rule it out. But, I know that I am much more likely to be mashing potatoes than mashing layers of web-available stuff. At least, today that’s true.

The Rollyo thing….not as exciting but useful. I did the assignment. I did the search for “privacy” and I saw one of my favorite blogs in the results list: The Annoyed Librarian. We love her. What we don’t love are sponsored links (call ‘em what they are: ads) smack dab in the middle of search results. Don’t like that at all. if that’s the “price” we pay for this “free” service, then I think my academic medical center will opt out, thank you very much.

But I like the concept.

And now, Ta-Dah! My work here is done.

Will we keep Miss(ing) Minnesota? Only time will tell, boys and girls. Only time will tell.

Happy Trails.

The Sound and the Fury

Ah, YouTube….I love it. I’ve seen splendid things and horrible things. Through YouTube I have become convinced that I have yet to find my one unique talent in life. Before YouTube, I was not even aware that one could compete in cup stacking or free-hand circle drawing or that people had developed ornate juggling routines to Beatles songs. The future is suddenly rosy. Who knows where fate may lead me?

Podcasts? I like ‘em. I’m not quite as enthusiastic about podcasts as I am about YouTube but that’s a technical issue on my part. I don’t have an MP3 player or an iPod, so I have to listen to audio files on my computer (meaning that for me they are not portable). I have two things to say about podcasts: Selected Shorts and This American Life. I love both shows. Thanks to audio files I can download, I can hear them both. Can’t say I’m a fan of any podcasts that began life as podcasts. Maybe I need to do a bit more splashing around in that pool to really grok this whole issue.

This is, of course, another homework assignment. It was fun. It was kooky. I could have spent, literally, hours and hours and hours doing it and then would have been willing to spend hours and hours more doing it. Really.

The question for today is: can we use these tools at work?

And the answer is a definite maybe.

It’s easy to think about how video might be used in a library than podcasts. Or, I should say, it’s easier for me to think about how video might be used. Videos of events, of course. Videos for instruction? Quite possibly. Podcasts for events? Doubtful. Instruction? Probably.

There are some problems I see with both types of media when it comes to using them in the library:

(1) The highs and the lows. It’s easy to find great, high quality videos and podcasts. It’s easier, still, to find junk that’s not worth looking at or listening to. My instinct tells me that it’s not easy to produce the high quality work that would be worthy of our library’s name (or our own).

(2) The back story is more important than we acknowledge. Having the right equipment, training, skills, and experience is highly correlated with producing quality materials. Yes, I know most of us can use our cell phones to record video and then we can post it on YouTube. And that’s my point, I think. If we’re going to be doing this professionally (which is what we’re talking about) we need to spend the necessary time (and money) on all that behind the scenes stuff.

(3) Your mother was right: just because you can do it (technologically) doesn’t mean that you should do it. We need to find out if any of us have any natural talent for any of this. It looks so easy when David Letterman does it but, trust me, there’s no MLA CE course that’s going to turn your average librarian into David Letterman or Helen Mirren or Susan Stamberg or [your favorite media name here]. It just ain’t gonna happen.

(4) It’s not the drill, it’s the hole. Do we have a message worth putting into either format?

We can answer the question about how podcasting or videos or you-name-it might be used in a library as an esoteric, brain-storming sort of exercise. It can be fun. It can be useful sometimes.

What we really need, though, is to put our time into figuring out how to know what our users need. Many of us think we know what they need. And what we think they need may be very close to what they think they need.

Or we could be miles apart (in which case, we’re scratching our heads and saying, “Why isn’t anyone listening to our podcast??”)

For those of us in academic medical centers, this is a big question. We don’t just serve medical students. We serve several types of students (medical, nursing, other), all the faculty, the support staff, the researchers, the hospital employees, the patients, the administration, and more…. How is it that we learn what they need and, furthermore, how do we learn their preferred way of receiving whatever it is they need (information/services/help/etc)?

Now, there’s a question that’s worth my time. When I know the answers to those questions, then all this talk about YouTube and podcasting might be worthwhile.

And that’s enough thinking for today. Happy Trails.

Favorite Things

Here is what I have to say about this week’s assignment for our class: What could be more fun than sharing photos?

Gilbert (L) and Ferris (R) don’t care about photos. They care about naps and food and chasing after that little red beam of light from a laser pointer. That’s what makes them happy.

The rest of us, well, we enjoy other things, too. Like sharing photos on the web. Really.

Could the library use this function? Oh certainly. There could be photos of the library itself, photos of activities that take place in the library — all those sorts of things that people have been doing for awhile. I don’t know that I have any unique ideas for using photos.

But, I’ll be thinking about it.

And, in the meantime, I’ll keep taking pictures. You can see ‘em on flickr.

Gotta go. Happy Trails.

Have we seen the future (homework)?

Good lord, I hope not. As our web 2.0 assignment this week, we were supposed to try out web “office” tools. These include Google docs, Zoho, Microsoft Office Live, and Webex WebOffice.

I have only one thing to say:

If I have to create an account and the process annoys me, I quit.

If I manage to make it through the “sign up for a free account” process and then I have to spend more than 10 minutes trying to figure out how to get to the word processing part of this “Web Office Whatever”, then I quit.

And, if I make it through the “free” account sign-up and I manage to find the word processing portion of the site and then I find out it has screwed up other services I depend on (like my Hotmail account which I have had for who knows how long), then I not only quit, I think the homework assignment was inspired by Lucifer and meant to really annoy me.

I happen to LIKE Microsoft Office. I just don’t like having to pay for it. I taught myself Google Docs when my computer crashed and I didn’t want to have to pay for Office any more. It’s OK. It will do in a pinch. I’m not switching totally, though.

Don’t even talk to me about Microsoft Office Live. My own personal opinion is that it totally sucks. It annoyed me in every single category.

Zoho was a bit better. It wasn’t quite as annoying and, really, I think it has more potential than Google Docs. It seems cool.

Webex WebOffice….too annoying to even try to work with.

UNCLE!! I give up! I don’t WANT any more “free” accounts. I want stuff that works well. I want stuff I understand. I want stuff I don’t have to spend hours learning to use. I want stuff that won’t screw up my other stuff. I don’t want any more user names and passwords for services I will NEVER, EVER again use.

When I was a kid, there were little old people that lived in little old houses with mountainous piles of “National Geographic” magazines. Today, we have personal computers FULL of “free” accounts with their user names and passwords and who-knows-what floating around. Yikes.

Well, at least we can’t throw ‘em all in our trunks and drop them off at the local public library, expecting them to “do something” with them. (By that, I mean, of course, do something other than throw them in the trash….)

Say what you will, I’ve had enough. Enough.

Gotta go. Happy trails.

Anarchy, attitude, and aiding & abetting

Social bookmarking. Tagging. Another homework assignment. I’ve worked a bit with Connotea. Just getting my feet wet with CiteULike. Personally, I use del.icio.us and I’m pretty darn happy with it. It’s useful and liberating to be able to access my bookmarks from any computer. That’s actually helpful.

Tagging is anarchy. Or, at least, that’s how it strikes me. I’m not saying that because I think anarchy is a bad thing. Seems to work pretty well in this sort of realm.

My tags make sense to me. Your tags make sense to you. I can find my stuff. You can find yours.

The cool thing is when your tags make sense to me and I find something totally new that’s important to me that I didn’t even know was there. (That’s aiding & abetting.) Can be very, very interesting. This can lead me places. Places I actually want to go.

What I’m not so keen on, though, is the aesthetics. Personally, I just don’t like how these sites look. I like what they do. I don’t like how they look.

And I sometimes think that the aesthetics get in the way of people quickly grasping what’s going on at del.icio.us. People understand bookmarking, I think. Even if they are totally new to the concept of tagging, with help, they figure it out. The social part, the discovery part, sometimes takes a bit longer. Sometimes, you have to flip the switch a couple of times before the light bulb actually goes on. The del.icio.us page doesn’t help with this process, I don’t think. Just my opinion.

So, there’s a new challenge, I guess. Figure out how to visually improve del.icio.us.

And, just so everyone knows: even though I don’t like the way del.icio.us looks, I still think it’s useful and I use it. I’m learning more about Connotea and CiteULike because they may be useful to people I work with.

And that’s it for now. Gotta go. Happy trails.