7 Things to Do Before You Start Your PhD

It’s the time of year when people are announcing their PhD acceptances. If you are psyched to be doing a PhD, yay you! I have some advice for things you can do to make it easier. If you are already into your program or even graduated and haven’t done these yet, it’s never too late to do them. But I …

Fostering Information Literacy Through Autonomy and Guidance in the Inquiry and Maker Learning Environments - Koh et al, 2020

Koh, K., Ge, X., Lee, L., Lewis, K. R., Simmons, S., & Nelson, L. (2020). Fostering Information Literacy Through Autonomy and Guidance in the Inquiry and Maker Learning Environments. In J. H. Kalir & D. Filipiak (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2019 Connected Learning Summit (pp. 94–101). ETC …

Why I like St. Patrick's Day ☘️

I originally posted this on Facebook on March 17, 2016. I’m only 9% Irish, but I sure love Saint Patrick’s Day. I think most of my affection for it comes from St. Patrick’s Day 1991, when my sister, our mom, and I arrived at our Tallahassee church for the last round of the …

Wordle Walkthrough - 03/14/2022

As promised, here’s a walkthrough of my thought process for playing Wordle. This is the game for 03/14/2022. I begin most games with the word ATONE. This uses 5 of the 6 most frequent letters used in English (etaoin). After this, I know that the word will have T and E in it. I have eliminated …

How I win at Wordle (when I win at Wordle)

I don’t share my daily Wordle result, but I do play it most days. I get it in 5 or fewer tries 94% of the time, 3 or fewer 32% of the time. I wanted to share what I do in case it spares anyone else some frustration. The first key is to memorize this combination of nonsense words that will help …

Life stuff, health stuff, and the Wheel of Fortune (tarot card, not game show)

My sense of routine and timing and goal-setting has been completely exploded over the past month or so. The routines I put in place to help me cope in the face of my mom’s illness weren’t really doable last week because M was home from school Wednesday through Friday for a teacher workday and …

The middle-school-Kimberly-to-grown-up-Kimberly pipeline

I’ve been reading the Future Ready with the Library posts at the YALSA blog and it’s got me thinking about the skills I was building in middle school and how they have persisted and how I’ve leveraged them throughout my career. In middle school, I spent my out-of-school time …

I will never not be a caregiver.

I realized as I was helping my family in the face of my mom’s return to the hospital that there will never be a time when I’m not a caregiver and that given my family’s medical woes, I am much more likely to need to drop everything to caregive than many other people. It would be …

Write Source 2000: The book that started my obsession with writing craft books 📚📝

I own a lot of writing craft books. There’s the obvious, like Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, but I also have more obscure ones like Richard Toscan’s Playwriting Seminars 2.0. I have books about how to write romance, like Gwen Hayes’s book Romancing the Beat and books about …

Theory to practice: Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good

As we work on the Transforming Teen Services for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion project, one thing I have to be reminded frequently is that creating Connected Learning programming does not require providing for all three spheres: interests, relationships, and opportunities. Frameworks like …

Essays on essays on essays

I’m still thinking about essays after reading Jackson Arn’s “Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot​ | Against the Contemporary American Essay. Arn references other people’s writing about the essay without actually linking to that writing, but I have managed to track them down. The essay, James Wood wrote in The …

What even is my writing voice, anyway?

That critique of the essay piece I read and linked yesterday has sent me down a rabbit hole of other writing about essays. I’ll put together a list of links soon; for reasons I don’t know the original piece at The Drift didn’t contain links or citations for the other pieces it references, but I have …

How to write an essay (buyer beware, I don’t have the answer)

How does a person write an essay? I’ve been trying to figure out. The thing is, it’s a versatile form. So versatile, I can’t pin it down. There are the essays they teach in grade school. My eighth grade Language Arts teacher called the five paragraph essay a cheeseburger essay. I think she really …

Six month check-in: Who am I at 40?

It was my half birthday almost 2 weeks ago, so it seems like a good time to check in on whether I’m being the person I want to be at 40. Here are the intentions I set: I think I want to be a little less ambitious about 40, to set fewer goals. I want to be a loving and mostly gentle mother. I …

When is a gap not a gap? Doing research that hasn't already been done

An undergrad sent me a message thanking me for my post A Start-to-Finish Literature Review Workflow and asked the question: Is there an exhaustive way of making sure that the literature gap you have identified is genuinely a gap? The short answer is, no. There isn’t. But there are ways to get …

I love my job and some yammering about writing

How are you doing, Internet? I’m obviously Not Okay, with my mom having leukemia and all, but I’m trying to do things besides worry about her anyway. I’m doing pretty well at that. Have we talked about how much I love working for the Connected Learning Lab? Maybe we have. I’ll say a little more …

On indefinite hiatus from most social media

I’m taking an indefinite hiatus from checking or cross-posting to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and most other social media services, with the exception of Micro.blog. I’m doing this right now because I don’t like when stuff pops up in front of me without me choosing to see it, and that’s most of …

Testing my commitment to embracing radical uncertainty

This week is really asking me to live my commitment to embracing radical uncertainty. I’ve had a hypothyroidism flare due to the cold weather, which has impacted my sleep habits and energy levels. We had a big winter storm and while it hasn’t been a huge problem, it shifted some …

My reading life 📚

Since the Micro.blog community is starting a reading group in the near future, I thought it would be a good time to talk about my reading habits and tastes. My favorite books I’ve read in recent years are Tamsyn Muir’s GIDEON THE NINTH, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s MEXICAN GOTHIC, and …

How I’m Getting Through a Brain Fog Day

In October, I learned that for the first time since my diagnosis in 2011, I had actually gotten my thyroid hormone levels to what I consider optimal. Exciting, right? Then I went over three months without brain fog, and it was incredible. Sunday, my throat started to hurt a bit - a classic …

Future Directions for Connected Learning in Libraries

This is the fourth post in a series contextualizing my position as a researcher of connected learning. Here are all the posts published so far: What Is Connected Learning? How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries Connected Learning in Libraries: Changes and Challenges There are a number of …

Connected Learning in Libraries: Changes and Challenges

This is the third post in a series contextualizing my position as a researcher of connected learning. Here are all the posts published so far: What Is Connected Learning? How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries Connected Learning in Libraries: Changes and Challenges While libraries are poised …

How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries

This is the second post in a series contextualizing my position as a researcher of connected learning. Here are all the posts published so far: What Is Connected Learning? How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries The first element of connected learning is interest. Libraries explicitly support …

My time is vampire time: The critical disability studies concept of "crip time" 📚♿

I’ve seen and heard a lot of people in the Micro.blog community discuss the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. The hold list on this at my library is inordinately long; if I put a hold on it now I might get to read it in 3 - 5 months. So I decided to read the sample of it, …

What is Connected Learning?

I start working remotely for the Connected Learning Lab tomorrow and while a lot of people are excited for me, most of them don’t actually understand what I’m going to be doing. So I’m writing a blog series that I hope will explain that somewhat, and this is the first post. If you’ve read my comps …

IndieWebCamp An IndieWeb Webring  This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 .

I acknowledge that I live and work on unceded Lumbee, Skaruhreh/Tuscarora, and Shakori land. I give respect and reverence to those who came before me. I thank Holisticism for the text of this land acknowledgement.


We must acknowledge that much of what we know of this country today, including its culture, economic growth, and development throughout history and across time, has been made possible by the labor of enslaved Africans and their ascendants who suffered the horror of the transatlantic trafficking of their people, chattel slavery, and Jim Crow. We are indebted to their labor and their sacrifice, and we must acknowledge the tremors of that violence throughout the generations and the resulting impact that can still be felt and witnessed today. I thank Dr. Terah ‘TJ’ Stewart for the text of this labor acknowledgement.