Monthly Archives: June 2013

The Awful Things List

Posted on by
Reply

I am starting a list of awful things. This will be a list of things that disturb me, terrify me and unsettle my soul. I’m talking about gut fear. I’m talking about existential dread.

Relax. I’m not going to let you actually read this list. This is the kind of list archvillians use to neutralize their adversaries, rendering them useless to the world. This list is my kryptonite, my darkest closet, my worst bad dreams.

You won’t get to see the list itself. I hope you get to see what comes from it.

Fear is rich mulch for creative work. Fear and dread, when dealt with honestly, are the loam from which great stories arise.

I am keeping this list as an act of faith. I will keep this list as a way to make these fears manifest. It is a kind of conjuration. And then, I will write my way through the center of these fears. I will follow the stories through the center of my gut. I will press myself all the way to the back of the closet and beyond into the darkness that reaches out with no arms.

You will know when I have written one of these stories. It will tumble inside you like a upended chair. It will rise in your gut like an unstiffled scream. It will capture you where you stand and look at you with eyes very much like your own. This kind of story will recognize you and you will recognize it. And you will read but the words will be like glass. And the pages will have disappeared. And I will be standing inside your head. And you will be standing inside mine. And we will be holding each other bravely, giving each other courage and honoring the magic that comes when brutal honesty meets fear.

Flash Fiction: Parcel

Posted on by
Reply

I like to play around with words sometimes. Just put on a song and improvise a quick story to capture the sense of the music. It is a lot of fun to write this way. I can’t promise what it will be like to read. It is what it is.

Tonight’s song: Ear Parcel by Lamb.

******

Prompt: Ear Parcel by Lamb

He turned the paper over in his hands, his mind grasping for the unknowable numbers on the lost fragment. He had found the paper under the front seat of his girlfriend’s car. Torn, the paper only showed four numerals written in pencil. Four numbers. Three more numbers on the missing piece made it a phone number. Of course, nine made it an ISBN. One made it a zip code.

He wanted a cigarette. He hadn’t smoked in months but right now he wanted to smoke an entire pack. He wanted to light up and feel each disappear into the hot, bright light of his anger.

He wanted to burn the note. If it was a note. Maybe it was just a random scribble. Maybe it meant nothing. He should throw it away. Or put it back under the front seat of her car where he found it. Neither option worked for him.

So he stood outside her car, waiting. Any minute now she would walk out the front door of the office building with a dozen other people. She would see him waiting for her. She would smile. Then she would recognize that impatient, hurt look on his face. She would see the piece of paper in his hand and her smile would slip. In that moment, he would know everything. If he watched her carefully, in that one unguarded moment, he would know.

People were leaving the office building now. Tired faced men and women chatting as they fanned out into the parking lot to gather their cars and drive off to rejoin the parts of their lives they leave waiting for them while they are working.

And that was the worst part of it all, for him. There were parts of her life which he knew nothing about. There were entire stretches of her day which did not include him. There wasn’t even a boyfriend-shaped hole in that space for her. When she was working, he had might as well not even exist. When he tried to call, she was always in a meeting. When he sent a text, the message went unanswered or, worse, the curt reply: can’t talk now.

People were leaving the building. Some of them were smiling. Some were serious and sad-faced. They all knew his girlfriend, all of them. Knew her in a way he could never know her. She was a colleague. A coworker. A manager.

The way these people knew her. The lightness with which they carried that knowledge with them. The smug air they had.

A dark haired man in a nice suit smiled as he went past. Nodded. “Nice day,” he said in a way that made it impossible to tell if he meant it as an observation or an invocation. Either way, the man broke eye contact quickly and shuffled off to his car.

Guilty. That man had looked guilty. The smile was covering his guilt but the boyfriend could see through it. Suddenly, the boyfriend knew with absolute surety that the man had put his hands all over his girlfriend, had rubbed and smoothed and fondled her. Maybe only just moments ago. Maybe she was still inside, smoothing her dress, straightening her jacket, tucking in her blouse.

Maybe, if he could grab the man’s phone and see the last four numbers he would find that they matched the four numbers in his hand. That would seal it. He would know and she would be caught. There would be no escape. There would be no denial.

Except the man was already gone, leaving the parking lot in his sporty gray BMW. The boyfriend felt angry to be standing beside his girlfriend’s navy blue Camry. This was not the life she wanted. This was not the car she wanted to be driving. He was not the man she wanted to be taking home.

He crumpled the paper and held it in his fist. Somedays it was hard not to want to hit something. Everything was so unfair.

He opened his hand, smoothed the note out on his leg. She needed to see the note. He needed her to see the note in his hand.

The doors opened. There she was, leaving alone, smiling. Content with herself for a day’s work well done. Then she saw him and smiled wider. She actually skipped a step or two as she came to meet him. And then she was standing before him, the note unseen. She kissed his cheek.

“Thanks for picking me up,” she said, still smiling and went to the other side of the car.

“Sure,” the boyfriend said, unsure how this was supposed to go next.

“What’s for dinner?” she asked as he opened his door. “I was hoping for Thai carryout. There’s a new place we need to try. I’ve got the number written somewhere in this car.”

All at once, the air in the car was lighter. He felt his fists relaxed. He remembered the face of each person who had left the building and then, one by one, forgot them. They were strangers. They were inconsequential.

“Sure. Thai carryout sounds great.”

Writing, Running, Meditation and the Inescapability of Time

Posted on by
1

Being on vacation this week with no specific plans or agenda has given me the chance to reconnect with three activities that always help rebuild my sanity and restore my soul: running, writing and meditation. All three are habitual acts which, when practice, help me crawl out of my head and back into my body. While running this afternoon I was struck by the common thread between them. The practice of each puts me into a direct, inescapable experience of time.

When running, there are no short cuts. You set a goal (either time or distance), you start running and, whether you reach the goal or shop short, the entire time you are running there is nothing else happening. There are no distractions. There is no escape from the fact of what you are doing. When you are running, your body is doing only that. Your mind may be thinking thoughts. You may not be thinking about running but some part of your mind is always aware that you are running. There is an autonomy that takes over the body when you are running. Running does not require careful thought or specific planning beyond the simple, consistent mantra to keep going. The thing I like about running is that direct contact with time. Twenty minutes is not an abstract thing. When running, you feel every part of twenty minutes. There is a focus that comes from no where else. When running, you are doing those twenty minutes and those twenty minutes are doing you.

Writing is the same way. The only way to get words on a screen is to put them there. You cannot simply wait for them to appear. You have to put them there. There is always a first word. Then a second. Then a third. Usually, the words quickly group themselves into sentences. When you are writing well, you aren’t concious of reaching for specific words. You build the page by sentences – one after one, like laying bricks side by side on a wall. In writing, there is no escape. You can”t cheat. You have to hold the seat and do the time and stack the sentences together until they make something that did not exist before. Again, like running, writing requires its own focus. You cannot write while thinking of anything else. You can’t write and do the dishes. You can’t write and pay the bills. When you are writing there is an order and a logic to your life. You are writing and you are only writing and when you are finished writing you are doing something else.

Running puts me into the mindset for writing. When running, I always get the next idea or the next sentence or some other clear, specific gift to help the words get on the screen.

Mediation is much harder. If you really want to be placed in direct experience of time, you should sit on a cushion and do nothing but sit. You realize quickly that the mind is a wild creature, an untamed monkey, constantly trying to escape the present moment and rush forward to some unseen moment that does not yet exist. It is a painful thing. It is unpleasant and frightening. It feels maddening and you are always a bit relieved when it is over. And yet, when you  practice meditation and cultivate the habit of sitting with no gaining idea, you find you are able to settle down into the moment. In those few seconds, your body and mind are the same. They share the same purpose. They are relaxed and calm. They belong with you, and you belong with them. This is called mindfullness.

And then moment is gone and your mind is rushing ahead again, careening away from your seat with manic speed and abandon. Why is your mind so desperate to escape? What is it that has your mind so frightened? And even as your mind rushes away and you feel the loss of those few perfect moments, you recognize the distinction between how it felt when you were sitting and mindful and when you are were sitting and grasping, desperate for the ending bell to ring. And that recognition, while tinged with frustration and loss, is also a realization that we are delusional most of our waking lives. That we live and breathe and move inside of time but constantly struggle to place ourselves outside of time. We are always wasting these few fragile moments that belong with us to reach for things that do not yet exist. We are psychotic and time-sick and vow never to sit in meditation again because the experience is so disturbing and unsettling. But then we stand and are grateful because we have once again learned to see how moments connect – how the present becomes the past and also becomes the future. And how neither the past nor future have ever really existed. Only the present. Only this place. Only the place where I am now and the place where you are and so on.

I am writing about three kinds of transcendence. Often difficult. Often uncomfortable, yet somehow, each brings me back into myself. I have a tendency to climb up into my head and stay there like a cat caught in a tree. It is good to know I can always find my way down if I am willing to be uncomfortable and feel the passing of time. The experience of discomfort is always worth it. It always places me safely back on solid ground.

Vacation Ritual for the 21st Century

Posted on by
Reply

No one can stay connected all the time. It isn’t healthful, and it isn’t practical. You don’t have to travel to put healthy distance between yourself and your work. Sometimes, you just need to unplug.

My work life has been pretty hectic the past few months. I love the work that I do and I have recently had the chance to take on new, complex, interesting challenges. Still, I have run myself a little ragged. The term “overclocked” keeps passing through my head lately.

So today I am starting a much needed vacation, one week plus a few extra days to carry past my daughter’s sixth birthday. When I leave work for more than a day, I leave good people in charge and trust my team to make good decisions. I try to make myself available by phone and/or email in case of emergencies. Emergencies don’t often arise in the library. Still, I often monitor email while on vacation just to “”keep up with things”. This is crazy. I don’t need to keep up with things while on vacation. Not keeping up with things is pretty much the point of taking a vacation.

When I got home today, I decided to try something new. I disconnected my work email account from my phone. I can still scroll through my email once  in the evening, if I want. But the act of physically disconnecting my phone from work email felt really good. When email is too accessible, there is an irrational urge to check it often. Unplugging my work email from my phone prevents me from feeling the temptation to check it. Making work email inconvenient while on vacation makes “checking in” or “staying connected” feel less necessary.

I know I’m not that important. My team gets along fine without me. I know they will call if something  important actually happens that needs my immediate attention.

In the meantime, disconnecting for a little while is the only way to really get the benefit of time off. Do what you can to stop thinking about work when you aren’t at work so you can actually rest. Then, you can return more vital and focused, ready to pick up the work you left off, accomplishing stuff that matters.

My Personal Internet History

Posted on by
2

This is my first reflective essay written for the Internet History Technology and Security MOOC I am taking with Dr. Chuck Severance via Coursera. What’s your personal interent history?

*******

I first met the internet in 1992. I was a senior in high school when my friend Brian introduced me to a thing called Gopher. Gopher was a bunch of orange letters on a black computer screen. Brian explained the idea of how the computer in my parents’ home office was connecting to lots of other people’s computers through a series of networks. He explained how I could hear the sound of that mysterious connection through the erratic pings and whistles of our 2600 baud modem. He explained how I could navigate those networks through a simple, command driven menu. Everything was text based. I could get words on my screen to imitate the words on someone else’s screen anytime I wanted. I could read messages posted on bulletin boards by people I didn’t even know. Gopher could take me anywhere I wanted to go, so long as where I wanted to go was one of several dozen universities. I was not impressed. There wasn’t anywhere I wanted to go.

Brian was a smart guy. He knew stuff.  A few years later, he tried to impress me again with his knowledge of a thing called Mosaic. This was way better than Gopher, he told me. There was more than just words on a screen. There were pictures and colors. I could navigate with a mouse rather than text input command menus. He was right. Web browsing was way better than Gopher. It was easier, more intuitive and more appealing. There still wasn’t anywhere I wanted to go.

I was slow to catch on to the importance of the World Wide Web. I didn’t enjoy chatting with people I didn’t know on AOL. I still find chatting with people I actually know in real life a bit tedious. I didn’t like reading subpar fan fiction. There were too many great books sitting on my shelves unread. I did email and the occasional Yahoo search but logged probably less than two or three hours a week online until I studied to become a librarian.

As a library desk clerk, I was amazed when our card catalog was automated. Suddenly, books were easy to discover and locate. Instead of only three paths to a book (title, author, and subject), I could now search for books by keyword. Things I cared about became a lot easier to keep track of.

That’s when I started thinking about the importance of metadata and how good digital record keeping makes things easier to store, organize and retrieve. I began thinking about the internet like a giant database of millions of different kinds of things people cared about. I began to pay attention to how books, articles and other intellectual artifacts were coded, tagged and labeled for easy recovery. And then, I began to notice how much easier getting useful, personally relevant information had become.

In the library, I saw grandparents emailing grandchildren. I saw unemployed workers searching national job registries for opportunities. I saw people sharing recommendations about the books they read with friends scattered all around the world. These were all things libraries were supposed to help people do. Networked computers helped people do those things faster and better.

I received my Masters of Science in Information Sciences from University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2000. That same year, I took my first professional position as User Services Librarian at Roane State Community College. As a young librarian, I adopted the myth that libraries were somehow in competition with Google. I tried my best to teach my students that the convenience of Google was great but that serious research and real knowledge required the sacred authority that dwelled only in print. My gospel was that learning required sacrifice and discomfort and that the fun of the persistent, exhaustive search was its own reward.

I no longer believe that. The world has changed. Information is easy to get. Google and Wikipedia make facts and fact-like items easy to obtain. With the advent of wireless internet and mobile devices, we are positively swimming in easy to get information. Facebook and Twitter have changed the way we communicate with each other. Facebook makes it easy to share everyday details of our hidden lives with each other so that we can know one another more completely. Twitter surfaces like-minded fellows from across the world with whom I can share ideas and get instant, valuable feedback and useful articles without even asking. They know what I need before I do and they share it willingly. They share it simply for the joy of sharing.

People ask if the world still needs libraries in the age of Google, iPads, eBooks and Twitter. I think yes, but I’m not sure that those libraries necessarily need to look like they have looked in the past. I stopped telling my students that Google is bad. It isn’t. Much of the world’s best knowledge, scholarship and ideas are findable online. Not everything is accessible online, but most everything is discoverable. Licensing restrictions, pay walls and complex copyright processes prevent most current information from being easily, freely shared. But still, I believe there has never been a better time to be doing the kind of work that I am doing. The internet makes our information lives much richer, deeper and more complex. Information is everywhere, but context is scarce. The next work of librarians and educators is going to be helping people figure out how to make their best sense of these riches to build new things that are useful. This is the work that lies ahead. It is work that I enjoy very much.

This is the first few chapters in my personal internet history.

The Best Dads List

Posted on by
2

I have a great dad. I hope you do, too.

So many of the values I carry with me come from behaviors and beliefs my father modeled. My dad taught me to be respectful, tolerant, and curious. He taught me to enjoy doing hard things, to set high expectations for myself and not settle for less than my personal best. He also modeled patience, but I’m not sure that one stuck.

I’ll write more about my dad in a later post. Tonight, I am thinking about great dads in literature. These are the dads we get to adopt from our reading. Aspirational dads who offer enduring examples of what it means to be a father.

Here’s the start:

  1. Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird — He’s a obvious choice, I realize, but there is really no better example of a dad who is calm, rational and able to use the experiences of everyday life to create lasting moral lessons. Atticus is an exemplar for his kids. They don’t, of course, realize how special he is until they get some distance. When my daughter was born, a friend gave me a paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird wrapped in a homemade cover that read A Gentleman’s to Fatherhood. She was right.
  2. Oskar Schell’s dad in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close — We never meet Oskar’s father. He dies in the World Trade Center collapse before the book begins. Still, the memory of his father’s life and the trauma of his loss motivate Oskar on a quest of discovery that brings him into greater awareness of the world and how it really works. Our fathers set us on paths to become the people the world needs us to be.
  3. The dad in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — The world we knew is gone, destroyed by war and nuclear winter. Civilization has collapsed. The survivors are crazed, amoral cannibals bent on destruction disguised as survival. The father shephards his son on a walk across the country in hopes of finding some better life. There is no reason to believe they will find it but the father keeps them alive, moving forward and, above all, protects the innocence and hope in his son because he knows his son is going to need that hope to help build a new world. In the event of nuclear catastrophe or zombie apocalypse, this is the kind of dad I hope I could be.

That’s my start. Let’s make this a team sport. What dads from literature inspire you?

 

Open Education is about Student Control

Posted on by
Reply

Lately, when people talk about “open education” they seem to be thinking mostly about the ease with which students enter an online course. MOOCs are generally free and easy to join. In this sense, they are certainly open and this kind of openness can be an important way to allow access to education opportunities to people who don’t have money or live in place without a strong educational infrastructure.

Open can also refer to the ease with which a student can interact with the course learning environment in order to carry resources in and out. The ability to access learning resources outside of the course management system is a pretty big deal.

I spend a lot of time researching and supporting the development of online learning at my college. Recently, I have been coming to this work as a student. One of the things I admire about Chuck Severance’s Internet History, Security and History MOOC is the ease with which I can download videos, export calendars to my mobile device and track conversations in Twitter.

Every video lecture resides within the course management system but is also published on YouTube and available for easy MP4 download for offline viewing. This is a strong consideration for users who may not be able to watch the lecture videos while online. The user has the option of where and how they want to engage with the lecture portion of the class. I must admit the download option worked great for my laptop but I haven’t taken the time to shift them to my iPad for viewing. The in-course streaming hasn’t been seemless due to inordinate buffering. YouTube viewing has been my favorite option. It works well.

I understand that the native Coursera-hosted video version has additional content like embedded, interactive quizzes. I haven’t seen those yet so I will reserve judgement as to whether the trade is worthwhile. The point is I have several options and can choose the one that best suits my need.

I also like being able to export the course calender into a Google calendar which I can then carry on my mobile device. There is also an iCal option for Mac users to synchronize with their device calendars. This isn’t a huge deal for this course since the calendar is pretty spare right now, but if I were a student managing several courses, I would definitely want to carry everything with me in one place.

A few days ago I wrote about my first experience with the MOOC discussion boards. The introduction board was the heaviest use since most students are posting to that board. The other boards have less traffic and, so far, are easier to monitor. That said, class conversation isn’t limited only to native discussion boards. The class chat also happens across Twitter, Facebook and GooglePlus. Given the scale, the class conversation can spread across three social platforms without much trouble. Twitter is the highest use channel and the only one I really watch at all. Again, I have choices.

This brings me to my main realization. The current course management system (CMS) at my college is designed as an environment where students visit to discover, access and use course materials, lectures and supplementary learning resources. Students who want to send a message login to the CMS. Students who want to check their class schedule login to the CMS. Students who want to watch lecture or do class readings or make notes login into the CMS. Everything is contained in the CMS and nothing really comes out. The student goes there for everything.

I know part of this is instructional design, but the default condition is to use the CMS as a destination and/or storehouse. Instructors who want their students to take resources outside of the classroom figure out hacks.

I know really good students who use this system. They sometimes carry resources, schedules and materials out in Google docs to ensure that they can access and organize those resources in the way they want, when they want without having to be online and at a computer screen. There has to be a better way.

Mobile-friendly learning design is no longer optional for online learning.

A Quick Lesson in Web-Scale Education: Email Notifications

Posted on by
1

Second full day of my participation in Dr. Chuck’s Internet History, Security, and Technology. Note to self: the M in MOOC really does stand for massive, as in super freaking huge enrollment.

As with most online courses, the first activity is a short discussion board post about yourself and your interests, experiences or expectations for learning the course material. As usual, I posted my response and set my account to receive updates via email for additional posts to that thread. Emails spilled into my inbox all night, all morning and all day long. My most recent inbox purge found 225 unread emails. There were many more before that count and many more to come, I’m sure. I quickly unsubscribed.

Discussion boards usually have a daily digest option. I can’t find a digest setting so I just unsubscribed. I’m not sure I would want to read that fifty screen digest anyway.

I will need to come back to this problem of discussion updates. I suspect there is a setting somewhere that I have missed.

For now, I feel very much like a student in a lecture hall with 10,000 other students. This time, instead of everyone quietly listening, everyone is talking and saying something interesting and everyone one of them is speaking directly to me.

I am sure there is a better way to navigate the conversation. There needs to be.

Stay tuned.

Getting Started with MOOC #2: Coursera’s Internet History, Technology and Security

Posted on by
Reply

For the next 11 weeks, I will be learning about the origins, development and structure of the internet. I am taking a free online course taught by Dr. Charles Severance of the University of Michigan. There are several thousand other students taking the course with me. The course is offered by Coursera as a massively open online course, or MOOC. My classmates are joining me from all over the world.

The content is very relevant to the work I do and to the interests of this blog. I hope to share some of the things I am learning from time to time. Even though life is very hectic for me right now, I wanted to take this course because it fills a gap in my professional knowledge. My masters in information sciences did not dig very deep into the history and structure of the internet itself. I know the basic story — ARPAnet, CERN, Vint Cerf, Mosaic, Google, etc. My brief introduction to internet history focused primary on the social/cultural history. I want to know the fuller narrative. I want to know more about the technical aspects and how they have development. What, actually, is the internet? How does it work? Where is it?

This will be my second MOOC. I took a shorter 4 week course last month on Instructional Design for Mobile Learning last month. Like most people who sign up for a no-cost, online, no accountability course, I did not finish that course. I learned a few things and was fascinated by how it operated.

I am interested in seeing how MOOCs operate, since online educators, librarians, higher ed administrators and state government are getting pretty much obsessed with the prospects of delivering low-cost education at web scale. Whether web-scale, mass education is possible remains to be seen. I do know that MOOCs can deliver on the promise of low-cost, personalized, continuous professional development.

My first MOOC operated on the Canvas platform and felt like a really fun social media platform for smart people who liked to share their learning. It was a fun, collegial and inspiring learning environment. Pretty much like the best seminar class I ever had in grad school.

This experience will be different. The course is longer. The structure is more buttoned-down. Activities and lectures are released weekly. Activities, quizzes and exams are graded. Things are due on time to ensure some level of accountability. There are honor codes and, for a small fee, potential for a credential of sorts.

So I am looking forward to getting into this new classroom as a student and seeing what I can learn about online teaching that helps me be a better teacher and librarian. And I am going to try not to let this disturb my goal of writing four short stories in the next two months.

This is the kind of weirdness I do for fun.

Summer vacations are for wusses. 🙂