Kimberly Hirsh

🔖 Read The Coronavirus’s Next Move (The Atlantic) by Katherine J. Wu.

🔖🎮 Read Inside the fight to save video game history.

Great intro to the copyright issues at play in the conflict between game companies and museums & libraries over providing access to old games.

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

🔖Read The Ukraine Crisis Briefly Put America’s Culture War in Perspective.

Hi scholars. Can you point me to a scholarly definition of “space” that would encompass space broadly constituted, including physical space, digital/virtual space, and mental/emotional space? Asking for my IMLS-funded project’s Connected Learning Summit roundtable.

🔖📺 Read The Comedies That Understand What Peak Scammer TV Does Not.

🔖 Read The Girlboss Has Left the Building.

🔖📚 Read Back Draft: Meghan O’Rourke.

O’Rourke’s making the rounds to promote her new book, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness which I want to read so much. (I’ve got it on hold from the library.)

There are a couple of key quotes from the interview I want to share:

when I was at my sickest, I couldn’t write anything much longer than a sentence. Not a paragraph, and definitely not a chapter.

On my worst days, I feel this way. The difference between days when my brain is zipping along in clarity and wheh it’s slogging through fog is hard to communicate. It is vast.

I was talking about this with a student the other day, and she made a great point. Writers are always being told that you need to be at your desk every day, that you have to push through. And for writers like herself — she has several chronic illnesses — that’s just not feasible. It’s an unreasonable expectation, and an unhealthy one.

Yes! I sometimes scold myself for not writing every day but this is important to remember. It’s also important to capitalize on the good days when we have them.

I wanted the book to be readable for people like me. When you suffer from brain fog, it’s tough to sustain your attention for so long. That’s also why I wanted the chapters to be relatively short and digestible.

This is awesome. I turn to essays when my brain is foggy but I want to read. I’m going to think more about what accessible literature means with respect to cognitive capacity.

🔖 Read How Gullibility Became Our New Normal.

I love when information literacy pops up in popular publications like this. These pieces can be models for my own public writing.

🔖 Read Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?.

Another great piece with an argument centered on the importance of information literacy.

🔖📚 Read “The Invisible Kingdom” Shines a Light on Women’s Chronic Pain.

Another great interview with Meghan O’Rourke. Here are some quotes that stood out for me this time:

I used to say to one of my doctors that I didn’t care that I was in pain. The thing that undid me was the brain fog and the fatigue, because they subsumed my entire being. They washed away any effort of will that I might have. And so they made it impossible for me to write.

This is so true for me. I can tolerate a lot of physical pain. I didn’t know how much until with health coaching, hard work, and a good doctor I started to feel better. But I couldn’t, still can’t, push through fatigue and brain fog.

[With invisible illness] there’s no one coming to your bedside, there’s no meal chain organized.

I didn’t think about this just now but I have absolutely seen this play out with my mom. She’s been dealing with autoimmune disease for about 30 years. I don’t think she or my dad felt it was reasonable to ask for help with that, and so often when anyone in our family has talked about it, we’ve been met with advice about going gluten-free, doing acupuncture, meditating… These are all good and valuable things, but the contrast with the outpouring of questions about how people could help after her leukemia diagnosis is striking. Instead of “Oh you should try this” it’s “What can I do for you?” I suspect there were days when my mom was at her worst with Hashimoto’s that she was as low energy and could use as much help as she needs now.

🔖 Read COVID Won’t End Up Like the Flu. It Will Be Like Smoking.

Finished reading: Winterkeep by Kristin Cashore 📚

Cashore’s GRACELING was the book that fixed me after THE NAME OF THE WIND broke me (because I love it so). This is the 4th book in the Graceling Realm series and while it took me a while to get into, I ended up loving it.

🔖 Read Academic Waste. 🎓

Reading the schedule for GIFCon and my breath caught and I teared up a little at Kat Humphries’s paper title, “What’s this cheery singing all about?”: Fantasy television and the musical episode.

🔖 I’m always looking for Leonie Dawson’s post about heroic self-gentleness and struggling to track it down in searches so now that I’ve succeeded once, I’m dropping the link here so I can just search my own website for it next time.

🔖 Read 5 Ways to Thrive as a Multipassionate Entrepreneur

“Clarity comes from engagement, not thought.”

Whoa, I needed to read that.

🔖 Read How to Be A Successful Multipassionate Entrepreneur.

It’s good to have a statement that sums up what you do, writ large, that isn’t just a job title. And thanks to influences including Star Trek: Picard, Judaism, and multipassionate entrepreneurs, I’ve got one:

I leverage passion and learning to repair the world.

I’m thinking about adding an Ask Me Anything’s page to my blog. But I also might just sometimes make a post soliciting questions. What questions do you have? They don’t need to be specific to me or my expertise.

I added a Shop page to my website! Right now all that’s there are my Notion templates (all pay what you can, $0+). In the future I hope to add a Books I Recommend section with affiliate links to Bookshop.org and a Books I’ve Written section. Affiliates get 50% commission.

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.

Shang-Chi is all “1996” and later is all “PRESENT DAY” and it’s confusing how those aren’t synonyms.

Colored a page from Dover Coloring Book Fairy Fashion by Scott Altmann. I’m using jumbo crayons so I don’t get hand cramps. Coloreds this Canadian fairy in honor of Robin Scherbatsky and Cobie Smulders.

Finished reading: Shang-Chi by Gene Luen Yang Vol. 1: Brothers and Sisters by Gene Yang 📚