I'm generally a sociable guy. But not always. Like many sociable people, I need my own quiet time even in public. Recently, though, I've begun to realize that the problem might not be so much my need for quiet that keeps me from conversing.
I've realized vaguely for several years and more consciously for many months that the most tedious meetings for me are news only meetings. This is true both in the university and in my church where I serve on the lay leadership. I'm most stimulated and engaged by meetings in which ideas start bouncing around.
A number of months ago, I was at a church gathering in which members from different social strata were supping together. The edict came down from the organizers for everyone to sit at a table where they didn't know at least 2 people. Obediently, I did so. I struck up a thoughtful conversation with 2 college students, one of whom I knew only a little from a membership class I taught. I started getting a bit creative about the idea of volunteer service and ended up enjoying myself immensely. Not that I wouldn't have been conversational anyway in such a setting, but what made this particularly enjoyable was that ideas were starting to bounce around. By my own definition, I was engaging in i-rumination, and I was loving it.
I've been to social gatherings in which I've met new people and talked superficially. In those circumstances, I've enjoyed myself nominally. I've been to other gatherings in which I've connected well with people and gotten into some rousingly thoughtful and enjoyable conversation.
The difference is the exchange of ideas.
I've started to realize just how important to me the ability is to i-ruminate, ruminate intellectually. I've been aware of the importance in meetings. I've been aware of the importance in social gatherings. Now I think I discovered the importance to me therapeutically.
I was supervising a padawan in the library's Faculty-Staff Technology Resource Lab today. While editing a video project procedure with her, I caught myself getting compulsive about the details. The question was how much information to include. More now was time-consuming, but less now could mean more work or confusion for someone else later. I settled for more information now, but the need to resolve the issue of when to invest more time or not bothered me.
With a bit less work pressure during the summer than normal, I headed into the staff area vaguely desirous of a conversation with one of the other librarians. The boss JB was in a meeting with the collection development manager. The circulation manager was in late to cover evening hours. The serials librarian was away from his desk. Ambling into the break room, I found him starting a pot of coffee. He acknowledged he had some time and I sat down. I started tossing out the newest details of the video project (of which he already knew something being a media person in a former professional life himself).
He let me lay out the issues about this fairly trivial issue and let me connect it to the bigger issue of task management. With this project I was thinking to redesign some larger aspects of this annually recurring effort. Last year we were too hampered by the impending deadline to dare even tweak the procedure. This year we had started early enough to have the whole summer to breeze through. If we invested some time now, we could make life easier for someone else later and even have a better product. It didn't take long to recognize that the time we had available made it possible to do some experimentation with the procedure and still get the work done under the old procedure if a new one failed.
Good enough for me. I'd had the chance to process the issues by talking them out and reached a productive conclusion. And my mood had lifted considerably.
So, I've come to a greater understanding of how important it is for me to be able to talk ideas. It satisfies me professionally, socially, and now, at least I can speculate, emotionally.
If we ever meet, feel free to share with me something you've been thinking about lately. Share with me your own piece of intellectual candy. I'm sure to conclude the conversation happier and more thoughtful. And hopefully, I'll offer you a piece of i-candy in return.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Taking One on the Chin
I'd like to make it clear that I'm fortunate to have the boss I have. JB's a wise gal who knows how to use the strengths of us her subordinates. She began working for Library and Information Technology at Arcadia University in February 2008. I had high hopes for her from the start. She brought more than a few years of professional experience to the position. More importantly, she brought an amiable, warm personality that held high promise for bringing the reference librarians and instructional technologist into authentic synergism. Myself an aspiring manager (I also applied for the director's position she ultimately filled), I hoped to learn much by observing her.
I've paid attention to the suggestions JB's made for addressing various tasks and issues and I've valued each of her insights. A particularly thought-provoking lesson materialized today, though, and at my expense!
The library underwrote a number of information literacy grants that would pair teaching faculty members with faculty librarians to introduce IL to their individual courses. Three of us librarians paired up with faculty members for 7 courses. I had 2 courses, one in public health and one from among our first-year seminar courses.
My FYS professor is actually one I began work with this past fall. His grant would allow the course to incorporate IL even more fully. We met several times for the class last Fall. He already had numerous thoughts on how he could refine the course for next year.
The biggest hinderance to me and FYS prof working effectively together on this grant is that we're a bit too much birds of a feather. If I'm an idea person, he's an ideas person. We can come up with a lot by talking together, but I see him having difficulty nailing down all his ideas into a definitive few. And I was not the best partner to help him with the nailing.
With a major grant implementation deadline coming up at the end of June, JB told me she had spoken with him about his progress. She made an executive decision to switch collaborating librarians. I got benched for a nimble, more step-wise librarian.
Several factors came together to make this a good decision, though. My reliever is a hyperactive-type pseudo-ADHD librarian who has the best chance of fixing idea to paper by tirelessly interacting. For my part, I'm a pretty objective person who doesn't easily take things personally, so I was not offended by JB's decision. In fact, while she normally would go to great pains to make decisions like this with as much buy-in as time permits, she didn't even bother getting mine. She knew I wouldn't have a problem with it. And she was right.
Something I learned early about JB is that she values people's strengths and maximizes on them. Among the librarians, I'm probably the most willing and able to flex with the need of the moment. FYS prof needs a more step-wise collaborator? Give one to him. Even if it's not me.
For my part I did have a misgiving. I felt like I could have done a little better proceeding with my prof in a step-wise fashion. Here's what I learned from JB. When I shared this misgiving, she said, "Maybe you could have, but this is too small an issue to try to improve for. Let's save the effort for something more substantial."
I once heard a wise person say, "Pick your battles." This is what JB was saying to me: "Pick your battles against your own weaknesses. And I don't think this one is the one you should be picking."
Will I manage someone someday who also struggles with weaknesses? Sure. And I expect to draw upon this lesson when I do.
I've paid attention to the suggestions JB's made for addressing various tasks and issues and I've valued each of her insights. A particularly thought-provoking lesson materialized today, though, and at my expense!
The library underwrote a number of information literacy grants that would pair teaching faculty members with faculty librarians to introduce IL to their individual courses. Three of us librarians paired up with faculty members for 7 courses. I had 2 courses, one in public health and one from among our first-year seminar courses.
My FYS professor is actually one I began work with this past fall. His grant would allow the course to incorporate IL even more fully. We met several times for the class last Fall. He already had numerous thoughts on how he could refine the course for next year.
The biggest hinderance to me and FYS prof working effectively together on this grant is that we're a bit too much birds of a feather. If I'm an idea person, he's an ideas person. We can come up with a lot by talking together, but I see him having difficulty nailing down all his ideas into a definitive few. And I was not the best partner to help him with the nailing.
With a major grant implementation deadline coming up at the end of June, JB told me she had spoken with him about his progress. She made an executive decision to switch collaborating librarians. I got benched for a nimble, more step-wise librarian.
Several factors came together to make this a good decision, though. My reliever is a hyperactive-type pseudo-ADHD librarian who has the best chance of fixing idea to paper by tirelessly interacting. For my part, I'm a pretty objective person who doesn't easily take things personally, so I was not offended by JB's decision. In fact, while she normally would go to great pains to make decisions like this with as much buy-in as time permits, she didn't even bother getting mine. She knew I wouldn't have a problem with it. And she was right.
Something I learned early about JB is that she values people's strengths and maximizes on them. Among the librarians, I'm probably the most willing and able to flex with the need of the moment. FYS prof needs a more step-wise collaborator? Give one to him. Even if it's not me.
For my part I did have a misgiving. I felt like I could have done a little better proceeding with my prof in a step-wise fashion. Here's what I learned from JB. When I shared this misgiving, she said, "Maybe you could have, but this is too small an issue to try to improve for. Let's save the effort for something more substantial."
I once heard a wise person say, "Pick your battles." This is what JB was saying to me: "Pick your battles against your own weaknesses. And I don't think this one is the one you should be picking."
Will I manage someone someday who also struggles with weaknesses? Sure. And I expect to draw upon this lesson when I do.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Making Collection Development Friendlier: Wishful Thinking
Collection development has been an saga for me perhaps in part because I never took a collection development class. (Drexel University, where I got my Master of Science degree in Library and Information Science, doesn't require it.)
I was the first subject librarian hired at Arcadia University almost 4 years ago. I am subject liaison to the general and special science departments on campus and in that capacity conduct librarian research instruction sessions. I also provide collection development support to those departments.
Over the last 4 years, I've tackled CD on a task-specific basis. In Arcadia's Bette E. Landman Library, we've completed numerous projects that have helped me develop the way I think about our collection. We've evaluated our print serials collection. We've replaced missing books. We've weeded our collection. We're constantly recommending books to our departments to purchase. We process requests for new journals. And I'm still working on the way I see collection development.
Knowing myself, I'm not surprised at this learning curve. I've learned over the years of being a professional in several different fields that it usually takes about 3 years for me (for many people, in fact) to become comfortable with the responsibilities of a particular job. Since I don't do collection development as a primary function in my job--plus because there are so many facets of it--I'm still getting comfortable after 4 years.
With the end of the fiscal year approaching, June 30, our current effort is get departments to spend their department allocations. As a library, we have our budget divided among several line items. The book budget gets allocated among all the university's departments to ensure a well-balanced collection.
What I've discovered about our book collection because of the various projects we've done for it is that it seems to represent a kind of bell curve across time. (This is a guess, because I've never quantified it. This observation is also limited to our sciences--LCCO: Q.) Our oldest books seem to be 80-100 years old. The peak of the curve seems to be 1980-1990. Then the tail seems to drop off. Obviously we need to purchase more heavily to make our collection more current.
But if the collection should meet the needs of our users across the disciplines and the course subjects, the task of simply buying more books is complicated.
Here's what I need to help me purchase well for our collection. I need a holdings-based application that can analyze our collection.
1) First, I want to be able to see the course topics laid out across the LC call number range as our collection currently looks. Makes sense, right? Our collection should serve our curricular needs at some level. Perhaps even better, though much more challenging, is to map course topics across LC subject headings; challenging because books can only have one call number in a given collection, but they can have many subject headings. One book may serve multiple courses. But such a book doesn't contribution to a very specialized collection.
2) Since our collection peaks in numbers of books around the 70s and 80s, I want to see a representation of topics across time.
3) I also want to be able to superimpose the idea of priority. We may not want to develop historical topics in our collection, but we may want to purchase in newer or more specialized areas.
4) Let's make this application more robust. I need to see our collection weighted by the number of students registered in the courses served by a given topic (as identified either by call number range or subject heading). Courses with large enrollments using a large number of books should have the same relative number of books serving them as courses with small enrollments using a proportionally smaller number of books.
I need to see all these things in a way that I can manipulate and modify so that I can see where I need to be recommending purchases.
That's not asking too much is it?
OCLC actually has a collection analysis product that can do some of what I want. Because Landman Library is a member of OCLC, it can look at our holdings and compare it to the holdings of all its member libraries, including ones of comparable size. It can analyze by publication date. It costs $500 to set up the service. The annual fee is calculated separately. But OCLC does not have access to our enrollment information. I don't know what visualization capabilities it has. I just registered to demo it, so I can find out.
I'd love to see if I can find an information sciences student at Drexel University's iSchool who could analyze this problem and imagine a solution, if not even design one. Dr. Chaomei Chen has done considerable work on information visualization, although not quite in this area. While a student there just over 4 years ago, I went to a presentation of his, so I know of his work.
Again, am I asking too much?
I was the first subject librarian hired at Arcadia University almost 4 years ago. I am subject liaison to the general and special science departments on campus and in that capacity conduct librarian research instruction sessions. I also provide collection development support to those departments.
Over the last 4 years, I've tackled CD on a task-specific basis. In Arcadia's Bette E. Landman Library, we've completed numerous projects that have helped me develop the way I think about our collection. We've evaluated our print serials collection. We've replaced missing books. We've weeded our collection. We're constantly recommending books to our departments to purchase. We process requests for new journals. And I'm still working on the way I see collection development.
Knowing myself, I'm not surprised at this learning curve. I've learned over the years of being a professional in several different fields that it usually takes about 3 years for me (for many people, in fact) to become comfortable with the responsibilities of a particular job. Since I don't do collection development as a primary function in my job--plus because there are so many facets of it--I'm still getting comfortable after 4 years.
With the end of the fiscal year approaching, June 30, our current effort is get departments to spend their department allocations. As a library, we have our budget divided among several line items. The book budget gets allocated among all the university's departments to ensure a well-balanced collection.
What I've discovered about our book collection because of the various projects we've done for it is that it seems to represent a kind of bell curve across time. (This is a guess, because I've never quantified it. This observation is also limited to our sciences--LCCO: Q.) Our oldest books seem to be 80-100 years old. The peak of the curve seems to be 1980-1990. Then the tail seems to drop off. Obviously we need to purchase more heavily to make our collection more current.
But if the collection should meet the needs of our users across the disciplines and the course subjects, the task of simply buying more books is complicated.
Here's what I need to help me purchase well for our collection. I need a holdings-based application that can analyze our collection.
1) First, I want to be able to see the course topics laid out across the LC call number range as our collection currently looks. Makes sense, right? Our collection should serve our curricular needs at some level. Perhaps even better, though much more challenging, is to map course topics across LC subject headings; challenging because books can only have one call number in a given collection, but they can have many subject headings. One book may serve multiple courses. But such a book doesn't contribution to a very specialized collection.
2) Since our collection peaks in numbers of books around the 70s and 80s, I want to see a representation of topics across time.
3) I also want to be able to superimpose the idea of priority. We may not want to develop historical topics in our collection, but we may want to purchase in newer or more specialized areas.
4) Let's make this application more robust. I need to see our collection weighted by the number of students registered in the courses served by a given topic (as identified either by call number range or subject heading). Courses with large enrollments using a large number of books should have the same relative number of books serving them as courses with small enrollments using a proportionally smaller number of books.
I need to see all these things in a way that I can manipulate and modify so that I can see where I need to be recommending purchases.
That's not asking too much is it?
OCLC actually has a collection analysis product that can do some of what I want. Because Landman Library is a member of OCLC, it can look at our holdings and compare it to the holdings of all its member libraries, including ones of comparable size. It can analyze by publication date. It costs $500 to set up the service. The annual fee is calculated separately. But OCLC does not have access to our enrollment information. I don't know what visualization capabilities it has. I just registered to demo it, so I can find out.
I'd love to see if I can find an information sciences student at Drexel University's iSchool who could analyze this problem and imagine a solution, if not even design one. Dr. Chaomei Chen has done considerable work on information visualization, although not quite in this area. While a student there just over 4 years ago, I went to a presentation of his, so I know of his work.
Again, am I asking too much?
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Clogged Drain II
Here's where I can extol the benefits of both Twitter and blogging. I may not be writing a lot of blog posts at the moment, but I'm still tweeting regularly. On the other hand, it's possible to string together 3 tweets into one long thought, but blogging works so much better for that.
Last Sunday night, I put my idea to the test about unclogging my master bathroom sink drain. The first thing I did was remove the pop-up drain plug. It's pretty simple to do because the nut holding the pop-up lever in place is nylon. I can undo it with finger pressure. Pull the lever out, remove the pop-up drain plug, then re-secure the lever (otherwise water would leak out from the open nut!). Removing the plug allows the plunger to move unimpeded. (I can't claim credit for knowing this. I read it when I was googling the topic of clogged drains before my last effort.)
With the drain out, I applied myself to plunging. Hold one hand over the overflow hole (don't want the valuable pressure to come out there) and shoofa, shoofa, shoofa. I tried a good 5 or 6 times with slight improvements in flow, but not enough.
When the drain is completely open, you should be able to open both faucet valves full blast and have all the water drain out without accumulation. In this case, the water kept filling the sink after each plunging effort.
The theory I had was that enough pressure moving back and forth across the septic accretion would eventually work it loose. The concern I had was that the clog was too far away from the drain opening for the pressure from a simple plunger to work it free. I already knew the clog was nowhere in the drain from the plug back into the wall where the drain flow dropped. This meant it had to been in the wall, a good 2 feet away from the drain opening where I was plunging.
It can't be a good practice, I know, equating septic accretions in drains to food particles in teeth, but I'm not Miss Manners. When you have a piece of food stuck in your teeth with nary a toothpick in sight, you can use your fingernail, but sometimes that doesn't work. So you can suck air through your teeth to try freeing up the renegade ort. This can go on for a while, but eventually you usually sense the particle freeing up. Keep sucking enough and that bit of roast beef will eventually succumb. Burp.
It's the movement of the particle back and forth that allows it slowly to work free from the dental crevasse detaining it. My logic was that enough plunging would accomplish the same thing with my clog.
After a couple more tries with the plunger, the drain abruptly cleared. My mental efforts were vindicated. My clog problem was over. And I never paid a plumber.
I concluded last blog asserting that a success could mean I have a piece of i-candy to share with you. I've changed my mind and decided that the term "i-candy" only works well when the product is intellectual in nature--an illustration or a concept. So, no i-candy for you in this effort. Similarly the mental effort I might apply when the outcome is not physical ought not be termed "i-rumination." So I'm working on the idea of applying the term "mental mechanics" to the thinking effort. I don't have a term for the product yet. I'll let you know when I conceive one.
Next post: A return to i-candy. I think.
Last Sunday night, I put my idea to the test about unclogging my master bathroom sink drain. The first thing I did was remove the pop-up drain plug. It's pretty simple to do because the nut holding the pop-up lever in place is nylon. I can undo it with finger pressure. Pull the lever out, remove the pop-up drain plug, then re-secure the lever (otherwise water would leak out from the open nut!). Removing the plug allows the plunger to move unimpeded. (I can't claim credit for knowing this. I read it when I was googling the topic of clogged drains before my last effort.)
With the drain out, I applied myself to plunging. Hold one hand over the overflow hole (don't want the valuable pressure to come out there) and shoofa, shoofa, shoofa. I tried a good 5 or 6 times with slight improvements in flow, but not enough.
When the drain is completely open, you should be able to open both faucet valves full blast and have all the water drain out without accumulation. In this case, the water kept filling the sink after each plunging effort.
The theory I had was that enough pressure moving back and forth across the septic accretion would eventually work it loose. The concern I had was that the clog was too far away from the drain opening for the pressure from a simple plunger to work it free. I already knew the clog was nowhere in the drain from the plug back into the wall where the drain flow dropped. This meant it had to been in the wall, a good 2 feet away from the drain opening where I was plunging.
It can't be a good practice, I know, equating septic accretions in drains to food particles in teeth, but I'm not Miss Manners. When you have a piece of food stuck in your teeth with nary a toothpick in sight, you can use your fingernail, but sometimes that doesn't work. So you can suck air through your teeth to try freeing up the renegade ort. This can go on for a while, but eventually you usually sense the particle freeing up. Keep sucking enough and that bit of roast beef will eventually succumb. Burp.
It's the movement of the particle back and forth that allows it slowly to work free from the dental crevasse detaining it. My logic was that enough plunging would accomplish the same thing with my clog.
After a couple more tries with the plunger, the drain abruptly cleared. My mental efforts were vindicated. My clog problem was over. And I never paid a plumber.
I concluded last blog asserting that a success could mean I have a piece of i-candy to share with you. I've changed my mind and decided that the term "i-candy" only works well when the product is intellectual in nature--an illustration or a concept. So, no i-candy for you in this effort. Similarly the mental effort I might apply when the outcome is not physical ought not be termed "i-rumination." So I'm working on the idea of applying the term "mental mechanics" to the thinking effort. I don't have a term for the product yet. I'll let you know when I conceive one.
Next post: A return to i-candy. I think.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Clogged Drain
A number of months ago, I turned my mind to a developing problem: A slow drain. Not just any slow drain, an incorrigibly slow drain.
The obvious solution was the usual. I released the pop-up drain plug and cleared out all the accumulated hair.
That worked a little, but it was still not the drain of old. I've gotten a lot more tolerant of problems as I've gotten older, so the next effort didn't come for another couple (or more) weeks.
The next solution was to drop the drain trap and give that a go. I cleared out a good bit of accretion, but found to my surprise that the drain was still slow.
As far as I'm concerned, the thoughts I'd devoted to this problem don't constitute i-candy. Half-baked ideas and theories are what I call i-ruminations. (Our instructional technologist called them once ruinations. There may be some truth to that.) These efforts only become i-candy when they've reached the level of revelation.
The question was where did the clog reside? It wasn't in the stopper or the trap. In fact, I removed the drain pipe to the wall and cleared that outflow pipe right to the down pipe. So that meant the blockage had to be in the wall. The next step would have to be a professional plumber with a snake. But I'm as cheap as the next homeowner and didn't want to go that route until I'd exhausted the next easiest options. Short of borrowing a snake from some as-yet-unknown friend, I didn't immediately know what that option was.
In this case, I let the problem persist for a few more weeks as I continued to ruminate. Every time I used the sink, though, I'd devote more mental capital to the problem.
Actually, I did have an idea of the next easiest solution, but had already implemented it without any success. I'd taken a plunger to the drain at least twice, each time with no significant improvement in drainage.
But why hadn't it worked? If the developing blockage was in the wall, perhaps it was farther down the drain. If it was far enough down, the plunger could have failed simply because any change in pressure from the plunging action would have been inadequate so far away from the source. After all, air is a highly compressible substance; gases are like that.
If you blow through a short length of tube, the air coming out the end is pretty close to the pressure of that coming out of your mouth. As the tube increases in length, the pressure drops simply because of the compressive nature of gases. You have to blow much harder for the output pressure to be equal to the output for a shorter tube. The pressure change from a plunger is going to be pretty constant, so the farther away from the plunger the constriction happened to be, the less impact there would be from the plunging.
When the drainage matches the flow from a faucet trickle, desperation sets in. Oddly, the solution still didn't come in the form of a call to the plumber. My willingness to spend money had not increased an iota. So out came the plunger again. I didn't give up so easily this time. I shoofa-shoofaed a score of repetitions.
To my surprise the drainage improved. The flow now matched the flow from a modest faucet stream. It was time to ruminate.
If the septic accretion was further into the wall, why had any more plunging made a difference? (My willingness to try again was a bit less baffling. The cost of plunging is infinitesimal. The cost of a plumber? Shudder.) Repetition can be remarkably effective. The voice of a child asking for a cookie once is irritating. The sound of a child asking for the 100th time is erosive. (We do all know what happens if you give a mouse a cookie don't we?) I think what happened with my drain was that repetition did what just a few plunges failed to do; it gave an opportunity for some of the accretion to become loosened and freed.
I have a theory that plunging the drain for a longer time could make the real difference. I'll probably have to wait for the constriction to increase in order to maximize the pressure and its effectiveness, but if I'm right, I should have a freer drain, my hard-earned cash still in my pocket, and a happier wife.
I'll let you know. There may be some i-candy in it for you.
The obvious solution was the usual. I released the pop-up drain plug and cleared out all the accumulated hair.
That worked a little, but it was still not the drain of old. I've gotten a lot more tolerant of problems as I've gotten older, so the next effort didn't come for another couple (or more) weeks.
The next solution was to drop the drain trap and give that a go. I cleared out a good bit of accretion, but found to my surprise that the drain was still slow.
As far as I'm concerned, the thoughts I'd devoted to this problem don't constitute i-candy. Half-baked ideas and theories are what I call i-ruminations. (Our instructional technologist called them once ruinations. There may be some truth to that.) These efforts only become i-candy when they've reached the level of revelation.
The question was where did the clog reside? It wasn't in the stopper or the trap. In fact, I removed the drain pipe to the wall and cleared that outflow pipe right to the down pipe. So that meant the blockage had to be in the wall. The next step would have to be a professional plumber with a snake. But I'm as cheap as the next homeowner and didn't want to go that route until I'd exhausted the next easiest options. Short of borrowing a snake from some as-yet-unknown friend, I didn't immediately know what that option was.
In this case, I let the problem persist for a few more weeks as I continued to ruminate. Every time I used the sink, though, I'd devote more mental capital to the problem.
Actually, I did have an idea of the next easiest solution, but had already implemented it without any success. I'd taken a plunger to the drain at least twice, each time with no significant improvement in drainage.
But why hadn't it worked? If the developing blockage was in the wall, perhaps it was farther down the drain. If it was far enough down, the plunger could have failed simply because any change in pressure from the plunging action would have been inadequate so far away from the source. After all, air is a highly compressible substance; gases are like that.
If you blow through a short length of tube, the air coming out the end is pretty close to the pressure of that coming out of your mouth. As the tube increases in length, the pressure drops simply because of the compressive nature of gases. You have to blow much harder for the output pressure to be equal to the output for a shorter tube. The pressure change from a plunger is going to be pretty constant, so the farther away from the plunger the constriction happened to be, the less impact there would be from the plunging.
When the drainage matches the flow from a faucet trickle, desperation sets in. Oddly, the solution still didn't come in the form of a call to the plumber. My willingness to spend money had not increased an iota. So out came the plunger again. I didn't give up so easily this time. I shoofa-shoofaed a score of repetitions.
To my surprise the drainage improved. The flow now matched the flow from a modest faucet stream. It was time to ruminate.
If the septic accretion was further into the wall, why had any more plunging made a difference? (My willingness to try again was a bit less baffling. The cost of plunging is infinitesimal. The cost of a plumber? Shudder.) Repetition can be remarkably effective. The voice of a child asking for a cookie once is irritating. The sound of a child asking for the 100th time is erosive. (We do all know what happens if you give a mouse a cookie don't we?) I think what happened with my drain was that repetition did what just a few plunges failed to do; it gave an opportunity for some of the accretion to become loosened and freed.
I have a theory that plunging the drain for a longer time could make the real difference. I'll probably have to wait for the constriction to increase in order to maximize the pressure and its effectiveness, but if I'm right, I should have a freer drain, my hard-earned cash still in my pocket, and a happier wife.
I'll let you know. There may be some i-candy in it for you.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Twitter and Blogger
I knew a little about the benefit of tweeting from a New York Times article, but I've come to my own conclusions after 3 weeks of tweeting and blogging.
Background
I came to Twitter via the one person that I'm currently following: Joyce Valenza. As an adjunct professor who teaches a course on technology for school library media centers at Arcadia University, I have 2 field trips I take my students on. One to a K-8 school library and one to a 9-12 school library. The latter is where Joyce comes in. She's the school librarian at Springfield Township High School in Montgomery County, PA.
Last year I heard her mention Twitter for the first time. I recognized it for its instant messaging capability then because she tweeted about our imminent arrival and shared the greetings that subsequently arrived from across the Twitterverse.
Now
This year she asked if I was on Twitter yet. (No.) What tipped the balance in the direction of joining is her comment that she herself does not follow just anyone. She follows people who have something to say. This was interesting. People on Twitter aren't just sharing about what cat food they bought today. Some are sharing about more substantive matters. (Not that tweets about cat food don't matter. Any tweet reveals something significant about the tweeter. I simply wasn't ready to join Twitter to read that type of tweet.)
'Well I have something substantive to say. I'm thinking all the time about a whole boatload of weighty matters.' So I joined Twitter and immediately started following Joyce. I also started a blog because I knew I wouldn't be able to convey everything I wanted to say about a particular piece of i-candy I was enjoying in less than 141 characters. Then I linked Twitter and blog together. And I tweet and blog about matters of substance--to me. I try not to go on about nothing. There is are so many ideas going on in my head about many things, I don't much have to.
So I like Twitter because it does force me to encapsulate a solid idea in a few words. I like Blogger because I can delve into one topic at length. It's 2 great tastes that go great together.
I have had trouble finding people to follow. I've searched academic librarians and instruction librarians, but have found that what they have to say doesn't grab me. (I'm cool. I'll find people eventually.)
I myself have 5 followers on Twitter. None of them Joyce. (Again, I'm cool. I'm just not tweeting her kind of stuff. I am after all an academic librarian.) I have 1 follower on my blog i-candy by wangc. I think she's family (library family, that is).
Perhaps my i-candy is for you. Then join the list. Either one of them.
Works Cited
"Twitter." New York Times. 21 April 2009 <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/twitter/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=twitter&st=cse>.
Background
I came to Twitter via the one person that I'm currently following: Joyce Valenza. As an adjunct professor who teaches a course on technology for school library media centers at Arcadia University, I have 2 field trips I take my students on. One to a K-8 school library and one to a 9-12 school library. The latter is where Joyce comes in. She's the school librarian at Springfield Township High School in Montgomery County, PA.
Last year I heard her mention Twitter for the first time. I recognized it for its instant messaging capability then because she tweeted about our imminent arrival and shared the greetings that subsequently arrived from across the Twitterverse.
Now
This year she asked if I was on Twitter yet. (No.) What tipped the balance in the direction of joining is her comment that she herself does not follow just anyone. She follows people who have something to say. This was interesting. People on Twitter aren't just sharing about what cat food they bought today. Some are sharing about more substantive matters. (Not that tweets about cat food don't matter. Any tweet reveals something significant about the tweeter. I simply wasn't ready to join Twitter to read that type of tweet.)
'Well I have something substantive to say. I'm thinking all the time about a whole boatload of weighty matters.' So I joined Twitter and immediately started following Joyce. I also started a blog because I knew I wouldn't be able to convey everything I wanted to say about a particular piece of i-candy I was enjoying in less than 141 characters. Then I linked Twitter and blog together. And I tweet and blog about matters of substance--to me. I try not to go on about nothing. There is are so many ideas going on in my head about many things, I don't much have to.
So I like Twitter because it does force me to encapsulate a solid idea in a few words. I like Blogger because I can delve into one topic at length. It's 2 great tastes that go great together.
I have had trouble finding people to follow. I've searched academic librarians and instruction librarians, but have found that what they have to say doesn't grab me. (I'm cool. I'll find people eventually.)
I myself have 5 followers on Twitter. None of them Joyce. (Again, I'm cool. I'm just not tweeting her kind of stuff. I am after all an academic librarian.) I have 1 follower on my blog i-candy by wangc. I think she's family (library family, that is).
Perhaps my i-candy is for you. Then join the list. Either one of them.
Works Cited
"Twitter." New York Times. 21 April 2009 <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/twitter/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=twitter&st=cse>.
An Older, Less-used Hat
This morning I conducted an online orientation session to our library's resources for a group of 4 clinical instructors in our Physical Therapy department.
Background Info
Our physical therapy program results in a doctor of physical therapy degree. Students go through a hands-on training experience in offices where current professionals are actively seeing patients. This is called a clinical internship. Arcadia University has somewhere in the range of 500 clinical instructors in clinics all over the country. CIs who wish to have access to our library's resources online may request it. The session this morning was the first online orientation to help those CIs become familiar with what we have to offer.
I bring to this position an interest in the health sciences, but I'm a general reference librarian as well, and general reference is what I do for the most part.
Technology Issues
I was using Wimba to conduct the session, an application with which I've had a pinch of experience but not recently. Wimba allows participants to use either a computer headset or a telephone to participate in the session aurally and verbally. It took me 15 minutes of negotiating a computer headset, a telephone handset, and a wicked echo before realizing that all I needed was the telephone. Wimba connects the computer with the telephone through the phone handset. And this was happening AFTER the session started.
I also had 2 people of the 4 unable to follow my computer presentation because I failed to register them. (Fix that quickly.) A 3rd didn't know his password, but obtained a temporary one from the PT staff member helping me to organize the orientation. The first participant got on only because I noticed his voicemail message to me and was able to get him the conference call information before the other issues arose. All this juggling happened because I got into my office 5 minutes before the session was to start. Which itself required me getting the kids to a friend's house 45 minutes early so they could get to the bus stop.
Presentation Issues
Have you ever done a presentation without any visual or aural feedback from your audience? It must be what actors go through when they have to play to the camera. Wimba is like that because everyone is just listening to you. You have to maintain your train of thought, be animated, navigate the website, And sound capable with no audience feedback. Happily, that changed as I proceeded through the session and began inviting participation. I'm not afraid to call on people by name. And with a list of attendees in front of me in Wimba, no one is immune regardless of eye contact or lack.
Instructional Issues
I usually poll students to find out what they already know about using article databases. In the chaos of getting the session running, I never thought to do this with the participating clinical instructors. I learned further in that one of the participants Teaches students how to find clinical evidence. The rest had largely never used article databases.
Another of my practices during library research instruction is to make sure participants know how to limit searches to full-text because that's what so many university students want. If you're looking for one article on abortion, you don't have to be too picky. Limit the search to full-text, find an article, and force your paper to accommodate what the article says.
For anyone trying to do a comprehensive topic search, this isn't good enough because only a fraction of the total number of articles you retrieve in a search may have full-text. For students like these, I tell them not to worry initially how they will obtain the article. Find good information first, then use supplemental strategies to obtain the article.
With these CIs, I was in general searcher mode. I showed them how to limit their search results in PubMed. Them not being on campus to get any articles from journals we might have in print, I received a couple murmurs of approval. My experienced searcher interjected that she discourages her student interns from limiting to full-text because the articles might not be comprehensive enough to help make a clinical decision that will benefit patients.
I wholeheartedly concurred with her and offered mea culpa for presenting with the wrong hat on my head. Then I pointed to the supplemental strategies for obtaining articles.
The session ended up serving the purpose, both of educating the CIs about our resources and reminding me that I'm a little out of touch with the needs of health science researchers. No problem. I'm ready now for my next session Thursday night.
Background Info
Our physical therapy program results in a doctor of physical therapy degree. Students go through a hands-on training experience in offices where current professionals are actively seeing patients. This is called a clinical internship. Arcadia University has somewhere in the range of 500 clinical instructors in clinics all over the country. CIs who wish to have access to our library's resources online may request it. The session this morning was the first online orientation to help those CIs become familiar with what we have to offer.
I bring to this position an interest in the health sciences, but I'm a general reference librarian as well, and general reference is what I do for the most part.
Technology Issues
I was using Wimba to conduct the session, an application with which I've had a pinch of experience but not recently. Wimba allows participants to use either a computer headset or a telephone to participate in the session aurally and verbally. It took me 15 minutes of negotiating a computer headset, a telephone handset, and a wicked echo before realizing that all I needed was the telephone. Wimba connects the computer with the telephone through the phone handset. And this was happening AFTER the session started.
I also had 2 people of the 4 unable to follow my computer presentation because I failed to register them. (Fix that quickly.) A 3rd didn't know his password, but obtained a temporary one from the PT staff member helping me to organize the orientation. The first participant got on only because I noticed his voicemail message to me and was able to get him the conference call information before the other issues arose. All this juggling happened because I got into my office 5 minutes before the session was to start. Which itself required me getting the kids to a friend's house 45 minutes early so they could get to the bus stop.
Presentation Issues
Have you ever done a presentation without any visual or aural feedback from your audience? It must be what actors go through when they have to play to the camera. Wimba is like that because everyone is just listening to you. You have to maintain your train of thought, be animated, navigate the website, And sound capable with no audience feedback. Happily, that changed as I proceeded through the session and began inviting participation. I'm not afraid to call on people by name. And with a list of attendees in front of me in Wimba, no one is immune regardless of eye contact or lack.
Instructional Issues
I usually poll students to find out what they already know about using article databases. In the chaos of getting the session running, I never thought to do this with the participating clinical instructors. I learned further in that one of the participants Teaches students how to find clinical evidence. The rest had largely never used article databases.
Another of my practices during library research instruction is to make sure participants know how to limit searches to full-text because that's what so many university students want. If you're looking for one article on abortion, you don't have to be too picky. Limit the search to full-text, find an article, and force your paper to accommodate what the article says.
For anyone trying to do a comprehensive topic search, this isn't good enough because only a fraction of the total number of articles you retrieve in a search may have full-text. For students like these, I tell them not to worry initially how they will obtain the article. Find good information first, then use supplemental strategies to obtain the article.
With these CIs, I was in general searcher mode. I showed them how to limit their search results in PubMed. Them not being on campus to get any articles from journals we might have in print, I received a couple murmurs of approval. My experienced searcher interjected that she discourages her student interns from limiting to full-text because the articles might not be comprehensive enough to help make a clinical decision that will benefit patients.
I wholeheartedly concurred with her and offered mea culpa for presenting with the wrong hat on my head. Then I pointed to the supplemental strategies for obtaining articles.
The session ended up serving the purpose, both of educating the CIs about our resources and reminding me that I'm a little out of touch with the needs of health science researchers. No problem. I'm ready now for my next session Thursday night.
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