7 Things to Do Before You Start Your PhD

Itā€™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 havenā€™t done these yet, itā€™s never too late to do them. But I wish Iā€™d done all of them before beginning my PhD, so if you can do them ahead of time, I think it will go better for you.

1. Choose a citation manager.

Youā€™re going to be reading a LOT of scholarship: articles, book chapters, conference proceedings. Youā€™ll read some assigned by your professors and some you find for your own work. If you start out capturing all of them, itā€™ll be easier to find them later when you reference them in your own work.

You have two options here: something that will grab references for you and build citations and reference lists, or doing it manually.

Software that will do it for you

There are a lot of options for the former. I personally use Paperpile. It integrates with Google Docs, which is where I do most of my writing. It has mobile apps and includes a reader that will save your highlights and annotations. It costs about $30 a year.

Iā€™ve also tried Refworks, Zotero, and Mendeley. I recommend looking at the features for each option and choosing the one that looks like it will match best with your anticipated workflow. Paperpile is good for me because I like to read on a tablet and it requires no extra steps to set that up. Think about your plans for reading and your plans for writing.

Know that this is a pretty low stakes choice, as most of these have an export option that will let you move all of your references to a different manager easily.

Doing it manually

You can do this manually if you like, though it can get unwieldy if you start to build up a large collection of resources. (I currently have over 3500 in my Paperpile library.) To do it this way, I recommend setting up a spreadsheet according to Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vegaā€™s Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump method. (If youā€™re a Notion user, Iā€™ve got a pay-what-you-can template for doing this.)

To create the references to include in your bibliography, you can either build them manually or find them in Google Scholar and click ā€œCiteā€ to get a list of formatted citations.

If you go this route, you should be meticulous about keeping track of which references you use. I would recommend building your reference list as you write rather than waiting until youā€™re done writing.

2. Choose a way of storing readings.

With Paperpile, Zotero, and Mendeley, this is handled for you. If you use Notion, you can use their web clipper to gather readings. You can also just download readings into a folder you manage yourself. If you do this, I recommend backing them up to the cloud using Dropbox or Google Drive and backing up to an external hard drive for extra security.

3. Figure out how you prefer to read.

Knowing this preference will save you time later and help you build a reading-writing-citation environment. You might like to print things on paper, read them on your computer screen, or read them on a tablet or phone. Try all of the options available to you to figure out what you like best.

4. Look for information on your university libraryā€™s website about help with research.

Is there a specific librarian assigned to your department? Learn about them. Maybe even get to know them. You are not bothering the librarian. The librarianā€™s job is to help scholars with research. You are a scholar. The librarian will work with you.

Does the library provide instruction in how to use databases? Sign up for a session. Do they offer topic guides? See if thereā€™s one close to your research interest and get familiar with the resources included in it.

5. Learn to read and take notes.

This is the most important one. Donā€™t be like me and spend hours of your PhD reading every paper in excruciating detail. If you are in the social, natural, or applied sciences, check out Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vegaā€™s Abstract-Introduction-Conclusion method as a starting point, then dig deeper into readings that feel especially important for your own work.

Track everything you read, keep notes on it, and later you wonā€™t have to work as hard to hunt it down. Again, I recommend setting up a spreadsheet according to Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vegaā€™s Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump method. (If youā€™re a Notion user, Iā€™ve got a pay-what-you-can template for doing this.) Dr. Pacheco-Vega also has a lot of wisdom to share on note-taking techniques, so look at those and see what might work for you.

6. Develop an elevator pitch for your research interests.

Youā€™re going to have to introduce yourself and your research interests to people, a lot. Try to get down a quick explanation of your research interests. This will change over time.

For example, in my application, I said I was interested in researching how connected learning could fit in school libraries. Then, I said I was interested in interest-driven learning in libraries. Now, I am interested in how connected learning as manifested through fan activity contributes to information literacy and practices. (Would I need to define some of those terms? You betcha. In that case, I could say Iā€™m interested in how fans engaging in activities like cosplay and fanfiction learn through those activities, as well as how they find, evaluate, use, create, and share information.)

7. Get a hobby or two.

A hobby gives you something to do thatā€™s not school, and thatā€™s important. Ideally, itā€™s something you will have begun learning before school starts so that youā€™re not, say, simultaneously trying to understand Marxist geography and the sociology of space while also learning to knit. If you can get more than one hobby, even better. I like having a solitary one and one that will lead you to interact with non-school people. In my MSLS days, my principal hobbies were baking cupcakes and being in the Durham Savoyards. During the PhD, they were tinkering on the IndieWeb and doing improv comedy.

There are a lot of other things you might do to make your experience go smoothly, but if youā€™ve got these seven down, youā€™re going in with a strong foundation.

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. 94ā€“101). ETC Press.

This is a quick note that I’m really excited about this conference paper I found that builds a bridge between connected learning (my broad research interest) and information literacy (my specific disciplinary interest). I’m going to explore it more and dig into the connection later, but I’m psyched to find a new paper on this.

Why I like St. Patrick's Day ā˜˜ļø

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 church’s progressive dinner, and my dad, who had been living in Durham for more than a year, surprised us by showing up. Will and I have a picture from that Saint Patrick’s Day hanging on the wall of our parlor.

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 one possible position for each of those letters.

My next goal is to do two things:

  1. Systematically eliminate other location possibilities for T and E.
  2. Include as many of the remaining letters from the 12 most frequently uses letters as possible (i shrdlu).

So I try TIERS, which moves T to the beginning and brings in I, R, and S.

This locks E in the middle position, tells me that I chose the wrong position for T, and lets me know that S will be in there somewhere, but not in its current position.

I actually get a bit less strategic now. I only have two more possibilities for where T could go, so I figure I’ll try it at the end, as that seems more likely than the next-to-last place. That leaves me with 3 possibilities for S, so I start with the first of those. Now I’ve got to fill in two letters. So far I’ve got S_E_T. I try not to repeat letters this early on, which eliminates a lot of possibilities. I look at what’s remaining from letter frequency (HDLU). I consider and reject words with repeats like SHEET and SLEET. I think through other possibilities and settle on SLEPT.

Now I’ve got 4 out of 5 letters and know their positions, since L is in the word by not where I put it first. I’m looking to fill in the blank for S_ELT.

This is when I just start looking at the keyboard and plugging letters in. Swelt? Shelt? Skelt? Sbelt? Those aren’t words. What about SMELT?

At first I think that can’t be right, it’s just a joke word as in “He who smelt it dealt it.” But then I remember no, you can smelt iron, because smelt means “to melt or fuse (a substance, such as ore) often with an accompanying chemical change usually to separate the metal” (Merriam-Webster. (Also it’s a legitimate past participle of “smell” so " He who smelt it dealt it" is perfectly good English .)

So I try it.

Boom.

I hope this is helpful as you build your own Wordle workflow. Take care!

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 you remember English letter frequency: etaoin shrdlu.

I try to start with a word that uses five of those letters.

Next there are two tricks I rely on most of the time:

  1. Familiarity with common letter combinations/placements
  2. Systematic movement of yellow letters

The first one involves things like knowing that H is often part of a two-letter combo like SH, TH, or CH, and that these combos usually occur at the beginning or end of words. Likewise thinking about how there are vowels in most words, different things that often come before E at the end of a word (like ATE, ACE, ALE), or how two letters often appear together (like UI).

As for the second: once I get a yellow letter, I try words that use that letter in different positions so I can eliminate places where it doesn’t belong.

The last thing I do before random guessing is look at the unused letters on the keyboard and try to build words combining them with the pieces I already know.

I hope this has been helpful. I’ll try to post a sort of “play-aloud” with screenshots and my thought processes soon.

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 momā€™s illness werenā€™t really doable last week because M was home from school Wednesday through Friday for a teacher workday and conferences. Just today am I beginning to claw some of that structure back.

Today I did morning pages. I did a tarot reading for Pisces season. (The overall gist was one of recognizing abundance, not worrying where it would come from, and letting go of the need to try to create a perfect balance.) I had a smoothie. I filled one of my three medicine cases. (Two more to go!)

I cleared several small items off my to-do list. Soon, I will get down to work-work, continuing to analyze the documentation thatā€™s going to help us develop a typology of the challenges library staff face when implementing connected learning.

Iā€™ve had headaches almost continuously for a few weeks, partly due to hormone shifts, but maybe also partly due to stress. I had two cycles where I thought my body had sorted out my PCOS a little bit but here we are on Day 44, no new cycle in sight (a normal menstrual cycle is 40 or fewer days long from the beginning of one period to the beginning of the next). This is fine, or rather, not catastrophic. But disappointing.

I spoke with my doctor the other day. My Hemoglobin A1C is high - thatā€™s the number that says how my blood sugar has been over the course of the past few months, as opposed to the glucose measurement that really only tells you about the past 24 hours or so. (That one was high-normal.) My LDL cholesterol was high, too - but total and triglycerides were good, so letā€™s celebrate that!

My doctor recommended two new supplements and I asked about a third. One of the ones she recommended was corn silk for kidney function. When I eat things with whole corn, corn flour, or corn meal in them, I get joint pain. Iā€™m going to try the corn silk and see how it goes, but am prepared to stop it quickly if it causes pain and ask her for other possibilities.

She also recommended berberine for cholesterol and blood sugar, and agreed with me that it would be good to try GABA to improve the quality of my sleep. And she said it was smart of me to up my l-tyrosine when I noticed clinical signs of declining thyroid function (increased fatigue and decreased body temperature).

I write about these things because my life is a constant set of calculations relating to how to handle different conditions and the fact that my health will never be ā€œfixed.ā€ Chronic illness is not a problem to be solved; it is a condition to be managed.

I bought this Art Oracles card deck at the North Carolina Museum of Art when we were there to see the Mucha exhibit in December and I keep the Frida Kahlo card pinned on my corkboard because it says, ā€œConvalescence lasts a lifetimeā€ and that is something I need to keep in mind.

Oracle card depicting Frida Kahlo

I donā€™t expect Iā€™ll ever get a tattoo, but inspired by both my own experiences with chronic illness and having recently read Ninth House, if I ever did, I think it would be the tarot Wheel of Fortune, and probably the Wayhome Tarot version.

Several tarot cards from the Wayhome Tarot layered on top of each other in a spread. The Fortune card is prominent in the foreground.

(That picture is from the Everyday Magic website.)

The thing is, wherever you are on the Wheel, three things are true:

  1. At some point, things will be better than they are now.
  2. At some point, things will be worse than they are now.
  3. You will be back here again.

It would be good for me to keep these truths in mind at all times.

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 practicing theater, reading books, and coding in BASIC. I volunteered one summer at the library. (My memory of this is that somebody at school decided I needed more to occupy me and sent me to the counselor and when she asked my interests, “reading” was the only one she could figure out how to match with a volunteer opportunity.)

In my career, I’ve been an educator and public speaker (both use my theater training), a librarian, and a web editor (HTML is pretty easy if you’ve got a handle on BASIC). I use knowledge and skills from all of these domains as a researcher, too.

It’s fun and cool to think about the connections between that me and this me.

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 wise to design my life to accommodate this fact, rather than hoping for some imagined time with minimal caregiving responsibilities. Even if I get my own conditions well-managed, even as M. grows and becomes more independent, I will still benefit from the flexibility I need as a parent of a young child and a chronically ill worker.

This is a radical shift in my thinking about the future. I’ll write more about it as I tease out what it means for my planning practices and daily life.

Write Source 2000: The book that started my obsession with writing craft books šŸ“ššŸ“

I own a lot of writing craft books. Thereā€™s the obvious, like Stephen Kingā€™s On Writing and Anne Lamottā€™s Bird by Bird, but I also have more obscure ones like Richard Toscanā€™s Playwriting Seminars 2.0. I have books about how to write romance, like Gwen Hayesā€™s book Romancing the Beat and books about how to write science fiction and fantasy, like Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing. I have books about writing for different audiences, like children, and in different formats, like screenwriting. I have purchased many more of these books than I have read. In a sense, I have a whole little antilibrary devoted to writing craft.

As I was doing my morning pages this morning, I thought about my affection for freewriting and realized that it first started in seventh grade, when our teacher assigned us the textbook Write Source 2000. This was 1993, so adding 2000 to the end of things made them seem very futuristic. The cover of the book, which can still be purchased used, was very shiny. Itā€™s got a pencil-shaped space craft on the cover and kids looking up at it through a telescope. The third edition is available via the Open Library. I had the first edition, but I suspect theyā€™re very similar. The cover design is the same.

A lot of my initial affection for this book was because of its quality as a material object. The shininess of the cover. The fact that it was a trade paperback, unlike most of our textbooks. The page layouts inside were attractive. And the authorial voice was conspiratiorial:

Weā€™re in this together. You and I. Weā€™re members of an important club - maybe the most important club ever.

The book focuses on learning across settings, writing as a tool for learning, and metacognition (though it just calls it ā€œlearning to learnā€). I did not realize that this had been my jam for almost 30 years, but I suppose I shouldnā€™t be surprised.

Iā€™m pretty sure I still have my copy somewhere. If not, I definitely carried it around with me at least through college. I thought about buying it again but now that I know I can read it on Open Library, I feel okay holding off.

This book was the first book I read that talked about how to write, and I loved it for that. Iā€™m pretty sure I was the only kid excited by this textbook. (It also had new-book-smell, which for my money is equal in joy to old-book-smell. Really, if itā€™s a book in pretty good condition, I probably like how it smells.)

I canā€™t find the source right now because Iā€™ve read so much of her stuff, but sometime Kelly J. Baker wrote about the idea of writing as a career never occurring to her. It didnā€™t occur to me, either, though I did it constantly: in my diary, in journals, at school. In fifth grade I wrote a series of stories using the vocabulary list words, and it was all extremely thinly veiled autofiction where the characters names were just my classmatesā€™ names backward. They ate it up.

I started and left unfinished tens of science fiction stories about my own anxieties as a middle schooler, and in high school I wrote a silly childrenā€™s book (I think it was called The Hog Prince), Sailor Moon and Star Wars fanfic, and short plays (the plays were in Latin). In college, I wrote more fanfic, all of the school writing assignments, and blog posts.

As a teacher I wrote lesson plans and assessments. As a librarian I participated alongside my students in NaNoWriMo. Working in higher ed K-12 outreach, I wrote blog posts and newsletters.

Writing is, it turns out, a potential career, but itā€™s also just part of life.

During the next couple of years as I work as a Postdoctoral Scholar, Iā€™m thinking about what Iā€™d like to work on next. Iā€™m pretty sure it will involve reading and writing, because those activities are almost autonomic for me. I donā€™t know beyond that.

But maybe itā€™ll involve actually reading more of those craft books.

Theory to practice: Donā€™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 Connected Learning begin as more descriptive than prescriptive: they say, ā€œThis is whatā€™s been happening,ā€ not ā€œThis is the only way to make it happen.ā€ People like myself latch onto the aspirational qualities of this description and feel that if they canā€™t create a Connected Learning experience that encompasses the whole model, we shouldnā€™t even bother trying.

WE ARE WRONG.

Interests are the sine qua non of Connected Learning, so if librarians or educators start there by genuinely figuring out what youth are interested in and building their programming around that, theyā€™ve gotten started in that direction. When CL happens spontaneously, the relationships and opportunities often come about through the course of the activity. When I started doing community theater as a teenager, I built relationships with peers and adult mentors and I had opportunities to learn things about theater production, to serve on non-profit boards, to act as a stage manager and a publicist. These aspects were not built into the environment explicitly for my benefit; they were natural byproducts of me participating in my interest.

So if youā€™re a librarian or educator considering implementing Connected Learning, please donā€™t be overwhelmed by the multiple spheres and various possibilities. If youā€™re building from youth interests, you can bring in the other components over time.

The creators of Project READY had the same problem: we shared frameworks that itā€™s easy to feel you must implement perfectly or not at all. We discussed Dr. James A. Banksā€™s framework for multicultural education, which has four levels of integration, ranging from the contributions approach (what we sometimes call the ā€œheroes and holidaysā€ approach to culture) all the way to the social action approach, in which students actually work to solve social issues. It can be easy to see models where youth contact government officials and make social change and think, ā€œWell, I donā€™t have what I need to do that, so this model has nothing for me.ā€ But there are two other levels in the model, the additive approach incorporating new multicultural content without changing curricular structure and the transformation approach which involves reshaping curriculum to center multiculturalism rather than adding it on. If your current approach is at the contributions level, moving to the additive approach is preferable to giving up on the whole framework.

As with improving the nutritional quality of your diet, adding more movement into your day, or any habit change, moving in the right direction is preferable to not moving at all. For example, if you learn you have some youth at your library interested in cosplay, maybe you start by hosting some simple no-sew project events. Then over time you can find out if there is a cosplay charity organization in your area and find out if any of those cosplayers would be interested in sharing their expertise, and the youth might build relationships with them as well as each other. And those cosplayers might then introduce the youth to opportunities like participating in contests or engaging in charitable cosplay themselves. You didnā€™t start with all three parts, but you moved in the direction of Connected Learning at each stage.

Essays on essays on essays

Iā€™m still thinking about essays after reading Jackson Arnā€™s ā€œDot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dotā€‹ | Against the Contemporary American Essay. Arn references other peopleā€™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 New Yorker, ā€œhas for some time now been gaining energy as an escape from, or rival to, the perceived conservatism of much mainstream fiction.ā€

This refers to James Woodā€™s Reality Effects, which discusses John Jeremiah Sullivanā€™s essays.

For Brian Dillon, such an authority on the essay that he authored a book called Essayism, itā€™s ā€œunbounded and mobile, a form with ambitions to be unformed.ā€

The full title of Dillonā€™s book is Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction.

Mary Cappello, one of the most respected essayists around, claims the essay is actually a ā€œnon-genre,ā€ mutating too fast for diagnosis.

This is a reference to Mary Cappelloā€™s book Lecture. You can read the relevant excerpt at Literary Hub. I prefer Cappelloā€™s full description:

Midway between a sermon and a bedtime story, the lecture is knowledgeā€™s dramatic form. Nonfictionā€™s lost performative: the lecture. Cousin to the essay, or its precursor: that non-genre that allows for untoward movement, apposition, and assemblage, that is one part conundrum, one part accident, and that fosters a taste for discontinuity.

Assemblage and discontinuity seem key to the essays I enjoy reading, so I appreciate Cappello pointing them out here.

Arn turns to the personal essay boom of the 2000s, especially the 2010s, and mentions other writersā€™ explanations for the personal essayā€™s popularity.

Vivian Gornick, writing in The Yale Review, traces it all the way back to her youth, via the waning of modernism and the rise of the Holocaust memoir; Jia Tolentino, writing in The New Yorker, suspects the feminism-inflected internet economies that helped make her a star.

Arn refers to Gornickā€™s The Power of Testimony and Tolentinoā€™s The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over. Tolentino then cites Laura Bennettā€™s Slate piece, The First-Person Industrial Complex.

Bennett mentions ā€œpersonal essay habitatsā€ like ā€œGawker, Jezebel, xoJane, Salon, BuzzFeed Ideas.ā€ Bennett says

First-person essays have become the easiest way for editors to stake out some small corner of a news story and assert an on-the-ground primacy without paying for reporting.

Arn also mentions this, that the lack of money for publishing outlets to spend on funding writersā€™ experiences as fuel for writing makes the personal essay more appealing because everyone is an expert on their own experiences. Bennett goes on to discuss publicationsā€™ and editorsā€™ potential exploitation of new writers who think theyā€™re ready for a sensational personal essay to go public and only learn after the fact that they were not. These point to a more structural concern than much of Arnā€™s discussion of The Contemporary American Essay, which tends to focus on the ways individual writers engage in navel-gazing, write disconnected from broad sociopolitical issues like climate change and the impact of the Internet, and work so hard to be likable.

Bennett points to a gendered element to the personal essay boom, as well:

On its face, the personal-essay economy prizes inclusivity and openness; it often privileges the kinds of voices that donā€™t get mainstream attention. But it can be a dangerous force for the people who participate in it. And though the risks and exploitations of the first-person Internet are not gender-specific, many of these problems feel more acute for women. The reasonā€”aside from the fact that the ā€œconfessionalā€ essay as a form has historically attracted more women than menā€”is that so many of the outlets that are most hungry for quick freelancer copy, and have the lowest barriers to entry for publication, are still womenā€™s interest sites.

While Tolentino asserted that the personal essay boom was over in 2017, Arn points out that most of the essays in The Contemporary American Essay are personal, constantly making ā€œIā€ statements. They are also ambivalent, not just about the form of the essay itself, but about whatever theyā€™re writing about. Arn catalogs several times the essayists use ā€œperhapsā€ or ā€œmaybe,ā€ seeming to hedge their bets in fear of upsetting anyone with a firm, declarative statement.

Reading all of the examples Arn pulls out from The Contemporary American Essay, I got the distinct feeling that these essayists were all just reading each othersā€™ writing, going ā€œAHA so THATā€™s what an editor wants,ā€ and then putting their own spin on it. It feels like they read the first few pages of Austin Kleonā€™s Steal Like an Artist but never got to the remixing part. The frequent use of etymology as an in-road to an essay, the perhapses and maybes - I havenā€™t read the book, but based on Arnā€™s description there is a sameness to the essays in it.

In the middle of the piece, Arn says

The Contemporary American Essay (letā€™s call it TCAE) is not the contemporary American essay. I hope not, anyway.

As I was sharing some of the most hilarious-to-me essay quotes with W., I realized that I read essays and most of them donā€™t make these moves. Yes, there are a fair number of Steven Hotdog essays in my reading, but each of them seems to make the Steven Hotdog format fresh. Why am I getting essays that donā€™t read this way?

I realized that itā€™s probably about my genre of choice. TCAE is all about literary nonfiction. This can be treated as a synonym for creative nonfiction, but I prefer to think of it as a subgenre, or a mode of writing. The writers are deliberately Writing Literature. The essays I read tend to be cultural criticism, usually about pop culture, or deft at connecting personal experience with shared experience. They are published in venues that have a specific focus rather than in general interest publications like Harperā€™s or The New Yorker. Instead, theyā€™re in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Catapult, Tor.com, StarTrek.com. My favorites are often public writing by PhDs. These are the kind of things I want to write, too.

As often happens, Iā€™ve come to the end of this blog post and am a bit deflated and lacking in a conclusion, so Iā€™ll just point you to one of my favorite essays:

Youā€™ve Reached the Winter of Our Discontent by Rebecca Schuman

In which Dr. Schuman ruminates on the cool Gen X guy as he enters middle age, and how cool isn’t even a thing anymore.

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. Iā€™ll put together a list of links soon; for reasons I donā€™t know the original piece at The Drift didnā€™t contain links or citations for the other pieces it references, but I have used my librarian skills to track them down.

This has me thinking about my own writing voice and what it is. I think it varies. Of course I have a standard academic writing voice, but Iā€™m thinking for more personal writing. Mostly blogging.

I think I have two voices.

One is my Big Sister voice. This is vaguely didactic but not moralizing. Itā€™s an attempt to be helpful. This is the voice I use when I write about my experiences as a doctoral student and tips for doing research.

The other voice is more lyrical, vaguely witchy even, and also fragmented. This is the stream-of-consciousness voice, the more vulnerable voice. This is the voice I use when Iā€™m writing about my feelings.

These two voices add up to a fairly accurate representation of my headspace. Big Sister is when my mind is sharp, Iā€™m feeling good about myself, and I believe Iā€™ve got help to give. Fragmented dream voice is when Iā€™ve got brain fog, when Iā€™m feeling weak, or when Iā€™m feeling woo woo.

I think theyā€™re both valuable, though Big Sister voice is probably preferable for more audience-focused writing and fragmented dream voice for when Iā€™m writing primarily for myself. For a while, I thought I should pick one and go all in on it, but now Iā€™m happy to have these two different voices. They are both me, both verbal representations of my vibe.

What about you? Or your favorite writers? What kind of voices do they have?

Right now, Iā€™m in awe of writers who can write something that feels scholarly and beautiful at the same time. Sarah Kendzior is great at this. Hiding in Plain Sight is a terrifying book, an important book, and a gorgeously written book. I donā€™t think I knew those could all line up before reading that. I think thatā€™s the kind of voice I would like to develop. Maybe if I can get my two voices to play together Iā€™ll be able to make it happen.

How to write an essay (buyer beware, I donā€™t have the answer)

How does a person write an essay? Iā€™ve been trying to figure out. The thing is, itā€™s a versatile form. So versatile, I canā€™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 liked Jimmy Buffett. This pop culture reference was not as hot in 1994 as you might imagine.

So thereā€™s a basic format, cool cool cool. The cheeseburger essay is best for persuasive or argumentative writing, I think. In tenth grade, we had to write narrative essays. I wrote mine about the day I almost had to go on stage as Fern in a production of Charlotteā€™s Web where I had originally been cast as an Owl. I was really proud of this piece of writing. I included a ton of sensory detail. I probably have a copy of it in one of my juvenilia boxes. (Yes, of course I have juvenilia boxes, plural, for when I donate my papers somewhere. If you know me, you are not surprised by this at all. I am exactly the kind of person who would label the boxes full of her childhood writing ā€œjuveniliaā€ and move them from house to house rather than throwing them away.)

My tenth grade English teacher praised my essay but gave it something less than a perfect grade. When I asked her what was wrong with it, she said, ā€œI just would have written it differently.ā€

I was incensed. She couldnā€™t have written it at all. She didnā€™t have the personal experience. This was, to my mind, extremely unhelpful feedback. How could I improve my writing if the problem was simply that I wrote it like myself?

In college, we wrote papers. These were mostly persuasive/argumentative or research-based. (Pssst, all great research-based writing has an argument. Wendy Laura Belcherā€™s book _Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks can help you figure out yours.)

I wrote about Furor and Pietas in the Aeneid. I wrote about the extended wine metaphor in Horaceā€™s Ode 1.11, the source of the aphorism ā€œSeize the day.ā€ (The actual translation is ā€œpluck the day.ā€ Plucking the grapes is the first step in winemaking, but Horace uses it at the end of the poem. He begins the metaphor by saying we should strain the wine of life, arguably the end of the process, and works backward from there. I was really proud of this paper. Itā€™s the result of my only all-nighter.) I wrote about the validity or lack thereof of AP testing. I wrote about the Takarazuka Revue.

Most of these papers got good grades but when I read them now, I cringe. Their arguments are weak. Their evidence is thin. But they were good enough for class.

But good enough for class isnā€™t the kind of essay I want to write anymore. I want to write essays that mean things. Preferably that connect pop culture with life in significant ways. Like my essay about the Star Trek episode ā€œPeak Performanceā€ and impostor syndrome.

The thing is, I really thrive with a model. So Iā€™m looking at models for essays. And Iā€™m reading excellent essays, by Sarah Ruhl, by Kelly J. Baker, by Jess Zimmerman. (Jess Zimmermanā€™s Women and Other Monsters is probably the closest to the kind of writing I want to do.) By tons of other authors on Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and Catapult.

Theyā€™re all different, which is fine. It means, though, that I have to build my own model by combining these, rather than just following one.

I need to Steal Like an Artist.

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:

  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.

  1. 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).

  2. 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.

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 isnā€™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 youā€™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 Masterā€™s paper and dissertation research questions were suggested in the future research section of other scholarsā€™ 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 donā€™t think I can give better advice than that. Iā€™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.

Thereā€™s no shortcut, Iā€™m afraid. You have to jump into the literature before you know what the gap is. When everything youā€™ve read is referencing everything else, itā€™s safe to trust youā€™ve got a good sense of the topic and know where the gaps are.

I love my job and some yammering about writing

How are you doing, Internet? Iā€™m obviously Not Okay, with my mom having leukemia and all, but Iā€™m trying to do things besides worry about her anyway. Iā€™m doing pretty well at that.

Have we talked about how much I love working for the Connected Learning Lab? Maybe we have. Iā€™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 whatā€™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 whatā€™s next, which is why Iā€™m doing Jen Polkā€™s PhD Career Clarity program. I wouldnā€™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 donā€™t disagree. I still find myself attracted to the idea of being a freelancer, so Iā€™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 donā€™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 donā€™t have A Topic in mind is a gesture toward that. So is doing Morning Pages, and the Artistā€™s Way more broadly. (Iā€™m still doing that at my very glacial pace.)

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

I definitely idealize writing as an art form. I donā€™t know a way around that, and Iā€™m not sure I want to. I donā€™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 ā€œI wrote my way outā€ and ā€œWhy do you write like youā€™re running out of time?ā€ had made an impression, of course, but something about seeing it brought it out as bigger than a leitmotif. Whatā€™s bigger than a leitmotif? I donā€™t know. Something really big.

There was some other art that I was thinking about that has contributed to this idealization, but I donā€™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?

On indefinite hiatus from most social media

Iā€™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. Iā€™m doing this right now because I donā€™t like when stuff pops up in front of me without me choosing to see it, and thatā€™s most of what social media is. In particular, when my mute filters arenā€™t working because they apply to timelines but not other parts of an interface and ads are proliferating so itā€™s hard to find content from the people I actually followed, I just end up grouchy and I donā€™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 ā€Ŗ(919) 794-7602ā€¬. If you want to know whatā€™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.

Iā€™m not deactivating or deleting accounts, just logging off.

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 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.

My reading life šŸ“š

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!

How Iā€™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 hypothyroidism symptom (I know itā€™s also a COVID symptom, but this sore throat comes and goes in a matter of hours; Iā€™ve taken care all week to be masked and outdoors whenever Iā€™m away from home as I couldnā€™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 personā€™s body temperature - and I was getting 97.7 (classic mediocre thyroid for me) and even 97.5 (bad sign, yā€™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 ā€œdressingā€ 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 wouldnā€™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 didnā€™t have anything I could get done without intense mental effort. Then I realized that in some notes I made yesterday, I had said, ā€œWe might want to make a checklistā€¦ā€ Making a checklist and populating it is definitely something I could do, so thatā€™s what I focused on.

Whatā€™s next? Well, because I didnā€™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 wonā€™t be able to talk to my doctor about this feeling for a couple weeks. But I also donā€™t want to live through the next two weeks in a fog. So Iā€™m going to up the amount of l-tyrosine Iā€™m taking. I wouldnā€™t do this except that it is the thing I did most recently that got my thyroid hormone levels to that optimal place and itā€™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, Iā€™ll go back down. But my hope is this will clear the fog.

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:

  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 Iā€™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 Iā€™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 doesnā€™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.

Thatā€™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!

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:

  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 ā€œresourceā€ 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 youthā€™s connected learning:

  1. …they must be ready and willing to transition from expert to facilitatorā€¦
  2. ā€¦[they] need to apply interdisciplinary approaches to establish equal partnership and learning opportunities that facilitate discovery and use of digital mediaā€¦
  3. …they should be able to develop dynamic partnerships and collaborations that reach beyond the library into their communitiesā€¦
  4. …they should be able to evaluate connected learning programs and utilize the evaluation results to strengthen learning in librariesā€¦ (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 Marylandā€™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 teensā€™ lives.

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

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:

  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 arenā€™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 isnā€™t all about home or work responsibilities. Iā€™ll be interested to see how scholarship around this shift evolves. A quick search for ā€œā€˜third placesā€™ COVIDā€ 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 youā€™d like to explore them, here are some links:

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.

My time is vampire time: The critical disability studies concept of "crip time" šŸ“šā™æ

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, to help me decide I’d like to buy it.

As I was reading the introduction, I kept thinking about how my 4000 weeks have a different shape than many other people’s 4000 weeks, different than healthy people’s 4000 weeks. I kept thinking of the concept of “crip time,” which I’d heard but didn’t really understand beyond the concept that time seems to move differently when you’re disabled. This thinking was distracting me from actually reading the book, so I turned to the web to help me get a firmer understanding of “crip time.”

It led me to Ellen Samuels’s essay, Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, which was exactly what I needed. Samuels quotes Alison Kafer, who says

rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.

I have been trying to bend my body and mind to meet the clock in preparation for starting my postdoc, but I think everyone will be happier if instead I bend the clock to me. My body sometimes needs to be awake at night and asleep during the day. Instead of lying awake in pain trying to fall back asleep while listening to an episode of Star Trek because this is the time when people sleep, I can give myself permission to rearrange my time so the parts of my work that can be done asynchronously (basically everything but meetings, I think) can be done in brief chunks of time in the middle of the night.

This is a positive effect of coming to recognize crip time. (This felt like the right time to stop using quotation marks. I don’t know why.) But Samuels points out the negative elements, which will impact more people than ever before in the wake of COVID. Samuels does this so well that I’m reluctant to attempt to summarize. If you’re interested, I highly recommend reading the essay. For now, I’ll pull out just the bit that inspired this post’s title:

…crip time is vampire time. It’s the time of late nights and unconscious days, of life schedules lived out of sync with the waking, quotidian world. It means that sometimes the body confines us like a coffin, the boundary between life and death blurred with no end in sight. Like Buffy’s Angel and True Blood’s Bill, we live out of time, watching others’ lives continue like clockwork while we lurk in the shadows. And like them, we can look deceptively, painfully young even while we age, weary to our bones.

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 donā€™t actually understand what Iā€™m going to be doing. So Iā€™m writing a blog series that I hope will explain that somewhat, and this is the first post. If youā€™ve read my comps chapter on Connected Learning or seen my Connected Learning and the IndieWeb talk, some of this will be familiar.

Connected learning can be conceived of in three ways: as a type of learning experience that occurs spontaneously, as an empirically-derived framework for describing that type of experience, and as a research and design agenda aimed at expanding access to that type of learning experience. My brother-in-law, P., is actually a phenomenal example of a Connected Learner.

In high school and college, P. was interested in playing guitar. He started hanging out at a local guitar shop, connecting with a community there of peers and mentors. Through the connections he made, he was offered the opportunity to be lead guitarist for a tribute band, and that job took him all over the world. He has since embarked on a different but related career, working in media law. This area of law might not have been of interest to him if he hadnā€™t had experience working in the music industry.

Thatā€™s an example of a spontaneously occurring connected learning experience. From experiences like this, scholars have created a model to describe connected learning. This model includes three elements of connected learning: interests, relationships, and opportunities. P. was interested in music, built relationships at the guitar shop, and it led him to opportunities to perform as part of a working band and become a lawyer.

A Venn diagram demonstrating three elements: interests, relationships, and opportunities. The center of this diagram is labeled Connected Learning.

Image Source: The Connected Learning Alliance

This type of experience is easier to access with more financial and temporal support; the research and design agenda surrounding connected learning is an equity agenda that aims to broaden the availability of this kind of experience, making it possible for nondominant youth who might require additional support to access connected learning. One way to do that is to bring this kind of experience into public spaces serving nondominant youth - public spaces like libraries.

The work Iā€™m doing with the Connected Learning Lab is part of a grant funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services examining key needs for teen services in libraries:

(1) the challenges library staff face in designing and implementing CL programming for underserved teens and the means for overcoming these challenges, (2) ways library staff can use evaluative approaches to understand youth needs in CL programming, and (3) the means of demonstrating the value of CL programs and building stakeholder support for increasing their scope and scale, particularly to serve equity goals.

The products of this research will include

training modules, guidebooks, mentoring supports, case studies, videos, practice briefs, topical papers, and blogs.

These are some of my favorite kinds of things to create, so Iā€™m extra excited.

My next post in this series will talk about how Connected Learning is already happening in libraries, with some examples from actual libraries.