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:

1. I think I want to be a little less ambitious about 40, to set fewer goals.
2. I want to be a loving and mostly gentle mother.
3. I want to take care of my own body, including making clothes built to fit it.
4. I want to keep trying new things and growing as a self-employed person.

So how am I doing?

For #1, pretty well. There are a lot of maybes right now. Maybe I’ll submit a paper for that conference. Maybe I’ll go to that webinar. Maybe maybe maybe. This fits in with the need to be super flexible as a caregiver and a person with chronic illness.

For #2, awesome if I do say so myself. My kid definitely knows I love him - and making sure my loved ones feel loved is my highest ambition, if that imagine-your-own-funeral exercise is any indication. I’m also doing pretty well with being mostly gentle. I step away if I’m too frustrated to be kind, saying out loud, “I’m frustrated.” A+, me.

3. I am slowly taking care of my body, though not making any clothes yet. I’ve made having a cup of warm lemon water in the morning a habit and have gotten into a routine of eating nutritious breakfasts that don’t have a ton of sugar in them and meet my target dietary restrictions (eliminate gluten and corn, limit dairy and nightshades).

4. This is another one where progress is happening, but it’s slow. My consulting work for Quirkos is the main way I’ve been doing this. This is on the back burner a bit while I’m doing the postdoc.

Pretty pleased with myself, actually. I’m doing okay.

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 close.

In my experience, the best way to begin is with a specific research topic in mind, but before you have fully developed a question. You get familiar with the literature using the tips from step 4 in my workflow: Identify potential literature.

• Consult with a trusted colleague.
• Search databases.
• Search Google Scholar.
• Follow citations backwards.
• Follow citations forwards.

After you look at the abstracts for these and eliminate the ones that are outside the scope of your topic, pay close attention when you’re doing your Abstract-Introduction-Conclusion extraction reading to suggestions for future research. In my experience, this is the most fruitful way to find gaps. Both my Master’s paper and dissertation research questions were suggested in the future research section of other scholars’ work.

As H. L. Goodall says in Writing the New Ethnography,

To locate a gap in any scholarly literature requires that you read a lot. (emphasis original)

Goodall offers some more specific advice as well:

• Start with the most recent literature.
• Notice which things are referenced repeatedly - the references all the most recent work has in common.
• Make a chart of names, relationships to institutions, and arguments.
• Look for patterns of citations, themes, and topics.

I don’t think I can give better advice than that. I’ll close out with more from Goodall:

You are reading for the storyline. You may not be sure what you are using it for, at least not yet. But that is all right. Be patient. Ideas, and uses for them, often take time.

You are also reading to find out what is collectively written about an idea, what individual voices have to say about that collective idea, and for an opening that you can address.

There’s no shortcut, I’m afraid. You have to jump into the literature before you know what the gap is. When everything you’ve read is referencing everything else, it’s safe to trust you’ve got a good sense of the topic and know where the gaps are.

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 about it anyway. I styled myself for this type of position throughout my PhD program, in spite of having no expectation that such a position would be available. I always live a better life when I just do whatever is interesting or exciting to me and let professional opportunities arise as they may. (Woo-woo types would say this is because my Human Design type is Projector and I would not argue with them.)

My job is to read about what’s making it hard for teen librarians to support connected learning in their libraries, interview them about it, analyze a bunch of data from my reading and interviews, and work with a team to develop tools to help teen librarians with this. It is dreamy as can be. Teen librarians (and librarians who serve teens and others as well) tend to be pretty awesome, based on my encounters with them. On their best days, they want to make space for what lights teens up. (On their worst days, I would guess they probably just want to go home. Being a school or public librarian is really hard as well as being rewarding.)

I do feel a need to figure out what’s next, which is why I’m doing Jen Polk’s PhD Career Clarity program. I wouldn’t have been able to pay for this as a student, but my consulting/content development work with Quirkos paid enough that I could actually afford it. Yay!

My previous explorations with ImaginePhD have indicated that writing, publishing, and editing is a good career family given my skills and interests, and I don’t disagree. I still find myself attracted to the idea of being a freelancer, so I’m doing some thinking and planning and learning about what that would look like. The ideal situation for me would either be enough consulting to cover the bills paired with writing as a creative outlet, or some sort of dream job instead of the consulting. I don’t think I want to depend on freelance writing for my income, but I do think I want to get words out of me and in front of human people.

Blogging even on days when I don’t have A Topic in mind is a gesture toward that. So is doing Morning Pages, and the Artist’s Way more broadly. (I’m still doing that at my very glacial pace.)

I’m reading through Joanna Penn’s Author 2.0 Blueprint and the posts and books she mentions in it. I’ll probably pick Bird by Bird up soon. I thought I’d read it before, but it’s not on my list of books I’ve read. I know I have a paperback copy somewhere but I think it’s lost in a pile of stuff in the attic, so I’m going to buy the ebook for my Kobo, too.

I definitely idealize writing as an art form. I don’t know a way around that, and I’m not sure I want to. I don’t have this idea of a person who spends all their time sitting in a garret writing, because as I learned when I was doing improv, you have to go experience life if you want to make art about it. (You could make art about sitting in a garret, I suppose.) When I watched Hamilton, the thing that stood out for me that for some reason had eluded me in listening was writing as a throughline in the whole story. The lyrics “I wrote my way out” and “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” had made an impression, of course, but something about seeing it brought it out as bigger than a leitmotif. What’s bigger than a leitmotif? I don’t know. Something really big.

There was some other art that I was thinking about that has contributed to this idealization, but I don’t know what it is. Definitely the story of Donna Tartt spending so much time on her writing at Bennington College was part of it.

Anyway. I am unapologetically romantic about writing as art and craft, but very realistic about the ways in which it can be a career.

How are things going for you?

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 what social media is. In particular, when my mute filters aren’t working because they apply to timelines but not other parts of an interface and ads are proliferating so it’s hard to find content from the people I actually followed, I just end up grouchy and I don’t need extra reasons to be grouchy.

If you want to get in touch with me, you can email me at hello@kimberlyhirsh.com or text my Google Voice number at +1 ‪(919) 794-7602‬. If you want to know what’s up with me, you can subscribe to my newsletter or RSS feed. If you want to respond to something I post, you can reply by email, join the conversation on Micro.blog, or send a webmention from your own site.

I’m not deactivating or deleting accounts, just logging off.

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 childcare plans away from what we usually have. The kid is home today for a school holiday, which is expected but different than normal, and due to the winter storm he’ll have a two-hour delay tomorrow. (Guess who won’t? His dad. Which means I’m in charge of all the dealing with the delay, I think.)

This has been a test, too, of my ability to do my job while living the life I live. Last week, I was able to get a lot done, even in the face of brain fog. I have hopes that I’ll be able to do likewise this week, and it’s nice that my next real deadline isn’t until next week or the week after anyway.

It’s hard to be a person who craves system and consistency and also live with the built-in uncertainty of chronic illness and parenting, and of course a pandemic adds another layer. I think it would serve me well to build some resilient, flexible systems. Sort of like menus as Dr. Katy Peplin and Dr. Katie Linder have written about, maybe. I’m going to keep thinking about this. I’ll let you know where I land.

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 Tracy Deonn’s LEGENDBORN. My favorite book of all time is Piers Anthony’s ON A PALE HORSE. (I’m aware my fave is problematic. I love his books anyway.) I first read it in seventh grade. It was the first urban fantasy book I had ever read and I loved that it combined an interesting world, cool philosophical and metaphysical ideas, and characters I loved.

I read widely and enjoy many popular genres. My default fiction genre of choice is fantasy. I also really enjoy soft science fiction, cozy mystery, and Regency romance. I rarely like realistic or literary fiction, but sometimes an author or book in those categories will catch my interest. I read a lot of nonfiction, too, usually focused on my latest obsession or professional needs.

Right now I’m reading Leigh Bardugo’s THE LANGUAGE OF THORNS, Caitlin Doughty’s SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES AND OTHER LESSONS FROM THE CREMATORY, and Kelly J. Baker’s SEXISM ED.

I read physical books, ebooks, audiobooks, and sequential art (comics/graphic novels).

I tend to read books marketed as young adult or adult books that crossover well to a teen audience. This is partly because of my professional history as a high school teacher and middle school librarian and partly because I love a good bildungsroman. I love the possibility and promise of the teen years. Also, I think reading should be fun.

I’m really impressed by authors who can create an evocative sense of place, like Erin Morgenstern or Alicia Jasinka.

I love to chat books and recommend reads, so please feel free to get in touch if you’d like to talk about books!

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 hypothyroidism symptom (I know it’s also a COVID symptom, but this sore throat comes and goes in a matter of hours; I’ve taken care all week to be masked and outdoors whenever I’m away from home as I couldn’t book a test before my isolation period would be up anyway) - and I took my temperature to see if I had a fever and my temperature was the lowest it had been since October - I had been hovering around 98.2 which is actually warm for me, approaching a normal person’s body temperature - and I was getting 97.7 (classic mediocre thyroid for me) and even 97.5 (bad sign, y’all). I was feeling a little more fatigued than before and then I realized that the weather has turned pretty cold for here, and remembered that cold weather can impact thyroid function.

Then this morning, I woke up with brain fog.

I have a dream job right now, and one of the things that makes it a dream job is that it involves reading and synthesizing a lot of information.

But these are really hard tasks with brain fog.

So I decided rather than to try to push through the brain fog, I would work with it, largely due to a timely newsletter from Katy Peplin about “dressing” for the brain weather you have.

Here are the things I did today to try and work with this brain fog:

Gave the day a soft reset. After breakfast and a cup of coffee, I went to bed and closed my eyes and listened to an episode of 30 Rock. This gave me a bit of clarity.

Blogged through it. So then I got up and to get my head in the game for work, I wrote the last blog post of my Connected Learning series. But then I was worn out.

Had a snack and read some fiction. Specifically, The Language of Thorns.

Went back to bed, again. I set an alarm to make sure I wouldn’t be down for more than 40 minutes (20 minutes to fall asleep + 20 minutes to actually sleep). This time, I got up and actually felt like I could do stuff.

Had lunch. I always am energized after a meal.

Figured out what work I could actually accomplish in this haze. At first, I thought I didn’t have anything I could get done without intense mental effort. Then I realized that in some notes I made yesterday, I had said, “We might want to make a checklist…” Making a checklist and populating it is definitely something I could do, so that’s what I focused on.

What’s next? Well, because I didn’t want to be indoors around strangers when I had a sore throat, I rescheduled some appointments I had this week for 2 weeks from now, which means I won’t be able to talk to my doctor about this feeling for a couple weeks. But I also don’t want to live through the next two weeks in a fog. So I’m going to up the amount of l-tyrosine I’m taking. I wouldn’t do this except that it is the thing I did most recently that got my thyroid hormone levels to that optimal place and it’s easy to go back down. This is an amino acid that a person with hypothyroidism should definitely talk to their doctor about using. If I start to get palpitations, I’ll go back down. But my hope is this will clear the fog.

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:

1. What Is Connected Learning?
2. How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries
3. Connected Learning in Libraries: Changes and Challenges

There are a number of opportunities for connected learning to grow in libraries. Here I’ll discuss some of them, beginning with the one most relevant to my current work.

Research-Practice Partnerships Research-Practice Partnerships allow library professionals to develop connected learning environments and programs in collaboration with researchers of learning and information sciences. The project I’m working on, Transforming and Scaling Teen Services for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (TS4EDI) is one such partnership. Myself and other researchers at the Connected Learning Lab, including PI Vera Michalchik and Research Manager Amanda Wortman, are working with state librarians in Rhode Island and Washington first to identify barriers and challenges to libraries creating CL environments and programs and then to develop resources to help library professionals overcome those barriers and challenges. The state librarians will recruit local public librarians in their state to be part of this partnership, and those public librarians will recruit youth to participate, as well. Other examples include the ConnectedLib project and the Capturing Connected Learning in Libraries project.

Brokering Youth Opportunities in Libraries Connected learning research over the past 10 years has highlighted the importance of caring adults or peers as brokers or sponsors for youth as they build their networks surrounding an interest. These brokers/sponsors can connect youth with other people and resources to help them expand their network and identify opportunities for learning and achievement related to their interest. Current research literature doesn’t explicitly offer guidance on brokering as a distinct activity, investigate the extent to which librarians currently act as brokers, or illuminate how youth may serve as peer brokers in the library setting. Research-practice partnerships and library professional-led professional development could address these questions.

Bringing Connected Learning to School and Academic Libraries So far, connected learning has been documented mostly in informal settings. A few studies have looked at connected learning in formal settings, but those tend to be individual classrooms rather than school or academic libraries. One area that offers potential for CL in these settings is the connection between interests and information literacy. This was the focus of my dissertation, in which I examined the information literacy practices of cosplayers. Cosplayers engage in connected learning as they learn about their interest, build relationships with each other, and find opportunities to contribute to the cosplay community or even become professional cosplayers. Throughout these elements of connected learning, cosplayers engage in information literacy, identifying resources, evaluating them, and even creating new resources. Because school and academic libraries are the primary center for information literacy education in their institutions and because they are not tied to a specific academic discipline, they have the potential to create opportunities for connected learning as learners build their information literacy practices.

That’s all for this series of blog posts, but I expect to write a lot more about connected learning through the course of my work at the Connected Learning Lab, so if you find this interesting, stay tuned!

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:

1. What Is Connected Learning?
2. How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries
3. Connected Learning in Libraries: Changes and Challenges

While libraries are poised to be environments conducive to connected learning, they may need to undergo further shifts to expand their support for connected learning. This involves a number of considerations:

Resources. Library professionals must consider not only physical and digital resources, but human resources as well - using “resource” to describe a person the same way we might use it to describe a book or a website. Library professionals can serve as a point of connection between learners, mentors, and other people in the environment beyond the specific context of the connected learning activities.

Technology and space. Current library policies may need to be updated to enable learners to engage in shared practices, socializing, collaborating, and publishing their work online.

Evaluation. Libraries have traditionally focused on quantitative measures of impact, such as how many people attended a particular program. These measures may not be sufficient to capture the impact of connected learning. Measures of connected learning need to capture the way learners move with their learning across settings beyond spaces controlled by the library; identifying specific desired outcomes can facilitate capturing evidence of and communicating the impact of a program. Qualitative data such as interviews or open-ended survey questions may capture this impact better than or alongside quantitative measures.

Role of library professionals. Library professionals must learn to consider themselves as sponsors and brokers of youth learning rather than mentors or authority figures. This means helping youth find other people and communities to support their learning and focusing on enhancing learning rather than enforcing behavior-based policies.

Program design. To create programming that fosters connected learning, library professionals may need to co-design with youth rather than deciding programming in advance and offering it to youth without their early input.

Competencies. The creators of the ConnectedLib project identified the following necessary competencies for library professionals to support youth’s connected learning:

1. …they must be ready and willing to transition from expert to facilitator…
2. …[they] need to apply interdisciplinary approaches to establish equal partnership and learning opportunities that facilitate discovery and use of digital media…
3. …they should be able to develop dynamic partnerships and collaborations that reach beyond the library into their communities…
4. …they should be able to evaluate connected learning programs and utilize the evaluation results to strengthen learning in libraries… (Hoffman et al., 2016, p. 19)

Professional development. Library professionals often will not have been trained in these competencies during their education, so they may need to continue their own learning via in-house professional development, programs provided by professional organizations, open online learning resources, and formal educational experiences. The ConnectedLib toolkit is one example of an open online learning resource directed at meeting this need, while the University of Maryland’s Youth Experience In-Service Training is an example of a formal educational experience designed to build these competencies.

I identified these potential shifts to library practices in response to a number of challenges libraries face in developing and implementing connected learning programming, including:

Attracting teens to skill-building programming. For some advanced interest-based experiences, youth need a foundational set of knowledge. For example, to create a sophisticated video game, a teen would first need a foundational understanding of game design and computer programming. It is a challenge to attract novice learners to this kind of programming.

Working with technology. Library professionals may lack the digital tools they need due to library policy, may know how to design or facilitate technology-focused or -infused programming, or may not feel comfortable acting as effective digital media mentors.

Unfamiliarity with the Connected Learning model. Library professionals may struggle with integrating all the different spheres and elements of the model. They may not have the knowledge, skills, or training they need to successfully implement the model.

Culture clashes. Teen culture may sometimes clash with library culture, requiring library professionals to negotiate these conflicting cultures to create programming that has a strong impact in teens’ lives.

The next and, I think, final post in this series will address future directions for connected learning 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:

1. What Is Connected Learning?
2. How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries

The first element of connected learning is interest. Libraries explicitly support the exploration of personal interests in both their collections and their programming. The second element is relationships. Libraries are intergenerational spaces that can be (but aren’t always) inclusive of people from nondominant groups. Libraries can serve as a bridge that connects formal and informal learning. Libraries are increasingly spaces where youth can have shared experiences creating new knowledge. They are third places, neither school nor home, where youth can gather, connect around their shared interests, and meet adult mentors and sponsors who can help them leverage a variety of resources in pursuing those interests.

A note about third places in the time of COVID-19: For many of us (the luckiest among us, I would argue), there is only one place: home, which is also work, which is sometimes also school, which is also where we do whatever social activity we do. This is certainly true for me. That said, online library programming can act as a virtual third space, a place to go for something that isn’t all about home or work responsibilities. I’ll be interested to see how scholarship around this shift evolves. A quick search for “‘third places’ COVID” on Google Scholar demonstrates that scholars are already thinking about this, including in the specific context of public libraries. I am exercising extreme restraint to not jump down a rabbit hole of exploring that research right now.

There are some examples of connected learning happening in both public and school library spaces. If you’d like to explore them, here are some links:

• YOUmedia Chicago
• Young Urban Scholars book club
• An afterschool program for inner city, middle school students to imagine STEM’s relevance in their lives
• Hack the Evening
• Publications from ConnectedLib

The next post in this series will discuss some of the challenges of creating connected learning experiences in libraries and some shifts libraries may need to undergo to provide more connected learning experiences.