Kimberly Hirsh

Herding Cats: A Simple Method for Working with the Disorder of Our Lives : zen habits

zenhabits.net

I had a feeling this morning that I needed to revisit Zen Habits and it turned out that I did, for this article.

I'm Turning 30. Do I Need Adulting Lessons?

There's a whole cottage industry devoted to teaching Millennials basic life skills. Are young adults that hapless, or is being a grown-up really harder now?

www.citylab.com

Pocket suggests things for me to read, and a few weeks ago, it suggested I read this piece about adulting. As I lay in bed, my toddler sleeping peacefully beside me, I thought, “I really need adulting help.” Which in one sense is ridiculous, because I have been doing some adulting basics, like holding a steady job, or paying rent or utilities, for almost 18 years. My adult self is, in fact, an adult.

But then I look at my immensely dirty car, or think about the extreme level of disrepair my home has fallen into over the past six years of home ownership, or remember that W. is the one who does the laundry and the dishes and the cleaning and the yardwork and I think…

Yeah. I could use some help.

…

I had a revelation a couple weeks ago while driving and noticing that my windshield wipers need to be replaced. I’m really good at projects. In one sense, it’s completely correct that my personal brand could be KIMBERLY: SHE GETS THE JOB DONE. If the job has a clear objective and a defined endpoint. I can manage human and material resources to make magic happen.

If, on the other hand, the job is a repetitive task directed at maintenance that will need to be done over and over again (like laundry or dishes or toothbrushing), then I’ll have to work harder to create a system to make sure it happens.

I’m trying to figure out what those systems look like.

Maybe acknowledging that all of life is a process of incrementally improving and coming up with ways to hack your brain is the real adulting.

#100DaysOfCode 2/100 Completed @freeCodeCamp Applied Accessibility, Responsive Web Design Principles, CSS Flexbox, CSS Grid, and Build a Tribute Page project.

First, huge thanks to Dr. Laura Gogia for the descriptive phrase “Dissertating in the Open.”

Early on in my PhD program, I decided that I wanted to be as transparent about my dissertation process as is ethically possible. Since I’m focused on studying Connected Learning, and openly-networked products are a key part of that framework, I wanted to share my own process. This blog post is the first step in that direction.

Grad school was like the part of Great British Bake-off where the recipe only says “now make frangipane” and people just stare at the camera. ?“Now make research.” ?

— Ian M. Hartshorn (@imhartshorn) November 11, 2018

When I came into this program, several of my cohort-mates already had clear ideas not just about their area of research interest, but about their specific dissertation projects. Others took a hard turn and completely shifted their research interests. I’ve followed a middle route; while I wasn’t zeroed in enough to turn every assignment into a chapter in my dissertation (or even my literature review), everything I did was somehow focused on interest-driven learning. But I was never clear on how it all would come together in a culminating research project.

Over the past three and a half years, I’ve probably floated almost 10 different dissertation topics or themes past my very understanding advisor, but none of them quite coalesced into a question. I should have known that the question would come out of the literature. My best research always comes from someone else’s “Possibilities for future research” section.

A few weeks ago, I was reading Dr. Crystle Martin’s (2012) dissertation. She investigated the information literacy practices of players in the World of Warcraft affinity space and, based on previous prescriptive models of information literacy and her own results, generated a new, descriptive model of information literacy for digital youth.

And then in her conclusion, she said:

“The more affinity spaces which are studied, the more stable the model will become, until eventually it will be a powerful predictive model that can approximate outcomes when parameters are changed” (p. 108).

I physically actually got chills. But I wasn’t sure how I would tie this into my own work.

Then I went to the Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy concert and saw the cosplayers.

Then I re-read Dr. Martin’s dissertation.

Then I realized cosplay is an affinity space.

I have really great professors, but I find it really frustrating that I have to google ‘how to write a prospectus’ because they give no official teaching on how to do it.

— Caris Adel (@CarisAdel) November 11, 2018

Then I sat down and over the course of a few hours banged out a dissertation prospectus to send to my advisor. It’s just a first draft. But I wanted to share it for those of you who are inexperienced in writing them. I’m lucky that my professor Dr. Barbara Wildemuth really walked my cohort through this process. Comments are open, so feel free to annotate it up and ask questions.

Next time, on Dissertating in the Open: building a comps package based on your prospectus!

#100DaysOfCode 1/100 Completed @freeCodeCamp Basic HTML & HTML5, Basic CSS, & Applied Visual Design.

Got excited about things that are more widely used than the last time I worked with CSS: border-radius, variables.

Had some trouble wrapping my head around HTML5 forms, since I’m a dinosaur and still have CGI code in my head… But I finally understood that label encompasses, you know, the label for the actual input element, and that name tells you, when you receive the submission, what the submitted input actually is answering… I think that in my own code, though, I’ll be commenting a LOT to keep all of these bits straight in my own head.

Drawing with CSS is blowing my mind. CSS interactions… I think if you couldn’t do it with CSS in 2002, I probably don’t know how to do it. Exciting to learn new stuff!

I’m publicly committing to the 100DaysOfCode Challenge starting today!  #100DaysOfCode

I did my first coding in BASIC as a reader of 3-2-1 Contact Magazine in the late 80s and early 90s. My dad was director of IT at a law school in the early 90s and responded to every complaint I had about not having access to Prodigy or AOL by telling me that the Web was where things were happening, not there. I wasn’t sure I believed him, but in 1995 my mom bought me a book about programming HTML for Netscape and I started building websites, first for local non-profits, then as fan endeavors. Sure, I ventured into the world of WYSIWYG page editors like Geocities, Angelfire, Microsoft Publisher, Adobe Dreamweaver, and Homestead. But I always came back to hand coding. By 2001, I had a personal domain and was using HTML, CSS,  and Javascript to develop a whole suite of fansites. I installed and troubleshooted Greymatter for my blog, but all the other pages were handcoded. I learned the basics of PHP so that I could serve dynamic pages and only have to update the content within a page when I wanted to make a change, and have the header, footer, and menus all be consistent throughout a site.

And then came WordPress.

I love WordPress.

But it made me lazy. Kind of.

Using WordPress is, I realize now after helping others with it, its own set of skills; it is not without a learning curve. But it doesn’t require me to know or use much code.

And I miss code.

Plus, WordPress is so much more customizable if you can code; you can create your own themes and plug-ins. Instead of shaking my fist when I want a functionality that’s not there, I’ll be able to build it. And, obviously, getting the skills needed for front end development has many benefits beyond just customizing WordPress.

The web WAS my job until 2015, but since then, all kinds of amazing developments have occurred and become widespread. (CSS Flex! CSS Grid!) I don’t know how to use them, and I want to.

So. To that end, and because I actually find coding relaxing - I once spent several hours of a vacation working through Codecademy courses - I’m committing myself to the #100DaysofCode challenge. I’ll be going through freeCodeCamp’s Responsive Web Design certification, because I’m rusty and want to get back to basics.

If this is something you have always wanted to try, why not start now? Join me!

Aquariums (American English plural) always feel like transcendent and magical spaces to me.

If MAGIC is aligning ENERGY with INTENTION in order to bring about CHANGE, VOTING is a MAGICAL ACT. Thank you for voting, for using your power to make the world a better place.

Brown Point Shoes Arrive, 200 Years After White Ones

Ballet dancers of color have long painted, dyed or covered point shoes in makeup to match their skin. Could this small barrier to inclusion finally be disappearing?

www.nytimes.com

When we would talk about examples of white privilege in our Project READY work, the fact that I can buy dance shoes close to my skin tone was one of my go-tos. It seems like nothing until you realize that dancers are spending hundreds of dollars and hours to modify pink or nude shoes.

Hi friends.

Here I’m declaring my intent to participate in #AcWriMo.

Here are my goals:

1. Revise and submit an article I've been working on for a long time.

2. Write the introductory overview to my comprehensive examination literature review package.

3. Create preliminary bibliographies for my comprehensive examination literature review package to share with my committee.

I recently wrote a six-page prospectus of my dissertation study. While it grew out of all the work I've done so far, it means that the many words I've already written and the unwritten-but-outlined parts of my comps either won't be used for this purpose or will be very much downplayed. I'm not starting from nothing, exactly, but there's a lot of work to do and not much time to do it.

To determine my goals, I looked realistically at my time constraints.

I have childcare five days a week for four hours a day. The first 30 minutes of that is usually settling in and the last is settling out, so really it’s three hours a day. I have a standing weekly meeting for the grant project that employs me, and writing isn’t the only work I need to get done in my childcare time. Because of travel, Thanksgiving, and meetings, I’ve only got 15 guaranteed writing days in November. (Other writing days are catch-as-catch-can; occasionally a grandma will offer a few hours of childcare or W. will take a long weekend stretch to solo parent, but those times aren’t predictable.) So aside from my task-related goals, I’m setting a goal for 15 hours of writing time this month. I’m not sure how long this overview needs to be, which is why I don’t have a word or page count goal.

Anyway, you heard it here: I’m doing #AcWriMo, but on my terms.