Category: Uncategorized

There are many in my RSS reader who never stopped blogging and have kept writing all these years, but there is something about breaking a silence that can cajole me out of my own blog silence just a bit.

I most certainly have a bit of fearfulness in putting my writing out there. This space has mostly been reserved for more personal writing so I’ve worried about the violation of a random person (or even someone I know) eviscerating my writing in the form of a comment. I don’t desire to “build an audience” or be well known outside of my little quadrant of life. I count myself lucky to have never had a reason to turn off comments, but I understand why people have had to turn them off once they started gaining a larger readership. People on the internet can be less than nice at times.

So why even write in a public way? Why not keep it all in a journal? I suppose there is something about seeing other people around me write and share their insights, experience, and themselves that makes me think I should give back a little too. When one is in community with people there is a desire to have some give and take, a bit of “I see you. Do you see me?”. Even at a time when the power of the individual creator on the web seems so large it also feels like the vast majority of technology is designed to drive consumptive and addictive behaviors. I still see this medium as a refuge from the compulsive refreshing and stream of thoughts.

I’ve been trying to find more ways to build in reflection time in my life. I’m fairly decent at making space in my life and not filling it was busyness, but there is still something missing for me in the equation and I am fairly certain a regular writing habit is it. I’m a classic infrequent pen and paper journal writer (although I managed to keep a pretty decent gratitude journal last year). The unwinding of thoughts and connections made when putting pen on paper or letters on screen still feels like a kind of magic. I want to spend more times doing things that make happier long-term, even when they are hard. I don’t run because I love running. I run because I love “having run” and the rewards that come from persevering. In much the same way writing can be a struggle, but it generally ends up be a satisfying way to have spent time. And like running I find I do best when I have accountability and a community of people writing is one of the best. So, thanks to you all who keep that going and keep me going as well.

In October of last year I started a new job as the Associate Director of the Digital Knowledge Center at UMW. Lots of crazy things had to happen for this to become my reality, but I’ve been beyond grateful for the opportunity to take on a new challenge and I have loved my new job so far.

It is funny to find myself back in the unit that brought me in to the conversation in the first place. As I’ve been reflecting back on the journey I’ve been thinking about that early twitter/blogging community that hooked me in to the world of technology and education as a young undergrad student working for the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT).

It meant a lot to me as a student to get to know people who worked outside my University. That community was due in large part to the staff members at DTLT cultivating those relationships and inviting me in to those conversations. Going through my earliest Twitter followers I find people like Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman, Scott Leslie, Tom Woodward, Gardner Campbell, Laura Blankenship, Barbara Ganley, Alan Levine, Mikhail Gershovich, Luke Waltzer, Matt Gold, Chris Lott, Barbara Sawhill, Leslie Madsen, and Mike Caulfield.

Is that not a ridiculously awesome list of people to know as an undergrad student??

These voices, along with the staff and faculty at my University, helped shape my thinking around what it means to be engaged in the world. Over the years I’ve gathered more and more voices and have been pushed to think in new ways (forgive me for not having the room to list them all). Yet, I still think about 19 year old me, and how incredibly lucky I was to have access to that conversation at all. That is why it pleases me to see many people blogging again (and why I’ve felt called to dust off this blog) because seeing the work people are doing is incredibly important. Of course some people never fell off the blogging wagon and if there is a Web 2.0 heaven, there is a special place for you there.

So, thanks for the conversation and the continued conversations. I’m glad there are so many people for me to continue to learn from out there.

There, I think I managed to blog about not blogging without really calling attention to it…oh wait.

I worry I don’t do a good job of talking with my tutors about the “why” of the ThinkLab. I seldom have explicit conversations about my philosophy around teaching and making. I still haven’t figured out a way to have those conversations that don’t come across as “let me randomly start talking about philosophy and possibly lecture you about things”. Sometimes a moment happens organically and I try to grab them as they come up. This week held one of those moments.

Recently we’ve been working with a class that does a 3D printing assignment. I’ve struggled to make this assignment a meaningful exercise (at least meaningful in my mind). After a tutor had started another print he said something along the lines of, “I don’t really care for assignments where people come in and 3D print one-off things and we never see them again. I like to see people work through a project.” Yes, this was a moment! Another tutor also hopped in to the conversation and we began discussing the purpose of this space, the value of making things, and where a makerspace fits in at a small public liberal arts university. They could articulate ideas, even in their first semester working in the ThinkLab, that told me they already understood so much about this space. I know I should have not been surprised since they are both the kinds of students who valued the ThinkLab as a creative space before I even hired them. I spent the rest of the afternoon beaming. This is why I do this work.

Now, how do I create more moments and opportunities like this?

One of the many questions I continue to struggle with when trying to figure out where to navigate the ThinkLab is what kinds of things should we support and at what level should we support those things? There are already some things that the ThinkLab is known for, 3D design and printing, that we’ll continue to do but many things are undecided at this point. In looking at other makerspaces I realized there is so much variety. Being housed in the library this thought keeps running through my head — we wouldn’t fill our stacks with the same books as Virginia Tech so why would our makerspace have the same tools and technology as theirs? How does a makerspace meet the curricular needs of a public liberal arts institution? How does a makerspace reach out to disciplines that don’t typically associate themselves with spaces that are like makerspaces? I find myself worrying about becoming pigeon-holed as a space. I worry that as the ThinkLab’s exposure increases we’ll fall in to a cycle of supporting a very narrow area to the expense of exploring possibilities. I don’t want to hear, “Only [fill in the blank] majors use the ThinkLab”. Much like our library supports a wide variety of disciplines I want the ThinkLab to support a varied student population. And just as the library makes strategic investments about what curricular needs it can support (no, we can’t buy that niche $1000 encyclopedia set, sorry) I want to make sure I don’t over commit to some disciplines. Sure we’ll show you some basic 3D modelling software, but you’ll have to figure out that advanced 3D modelling software for yourself. But am I placing limits in ways that are thoughtful of what is sustainable or am I placing limits because I fear what I do not know? (And I certainly don’t know a whole lot). I’m constantly thinking about what we currently have to offer and what I think we should offer and and the balance between what I know at the moment and what I think would be possible. I worry about offering to support something only to later realize that it is going to be beyond what we could sustainably support.

Luckily in the fall every single faculty member I worked with was willing to take risks with me to see what the limits of space may be and the semester went off fairly well. I am very lucky to have hired student aides that brought in their own background knowledge in areas that I don’t know a whole lot about who were able to pull off projects I wouldn’t have been able to do myself. There were times though that I asked my student aides to stretch in ways that may have been taking advantage of their general excitement to be working in the space. Over the course of the semester it became quite clear I needed to establish some solid structure about what we could definitely support and what would be experimental. I have spent a bit of the winter break working on actual tutorials that I can expect my student aides to take students through as well as rolling out an online scheduling tool. This has alleviated some of my worry about providing sustainable support, but I know there is more work to be done.

In writing this post I realize I don’t hate all these tensions, but they make  me uncomfortable (uncomfortable, but not paralyzed). There is no one right way to have a makerspace (despite the commodification of the maker movement). This is both liberating and terrifying. At times I wish I could stick my head in the sand and copy what so many other spaces do, but that wouldn’t make the space meaningful and useful to anyone in the long run. I want the ThinkLab to evolve with the needs of the school, but also be a source of inspiration that points in a direction. It is in this tension where people are working together and even disagreeing that some of the best stuff appears. I have a vision for the ThinkLab (maybe I should blog that one day?), but I know that some faculty member is going to show up one day and go, “I have an idea for a class” or a student is going to come in and say, “There is no place on campus that supports this, do you think the ThinkLab could?” and I’m going to be blown away and do everything I can to try and support that despite all my thinking about sustainable practices. I’ve already seen it start to happen.

How does one support wildly brilliant ideas?

 

 

This post is for the younger version of myself who struggled to care about schooling and to the the current students who feel the same way. It is no solution, but perhaps some consolation.

One of my biggest struggles as a student was sustaining the energy to learn something through an entire semester. I would start out most semesters with great gusto, but a few weeks in to the semester my enthusiasm for the topic  would wane and I’d inevitably fall in to the disillusioned questioning of, “Why am I learning this? Why does it matter? What is the point of learning this stuff?”. I distinctly remember during my sophomore year reading Yeats under a tree outside my dorm instead of doing work for a class. If my memory is correct  my attempt to decipher “Among School Children” was inspired in some way by Gardner. It may seem overwrought to say, but in that moment reading Yeats was the most important thing I could be doing because I had a sense that it would mean more to my life here on earth than working on the school assignment.

For a long time I’ve felt guilty over how poorly I performed at times during my academic career. There are times when I still feel that way, but I know that I can’t live with that regret forever.  I wasn’t very good at achieving decent grades in college, but it doesn’t mean I’m a failure. The structure that schools use to set up a curriculum, dividing things up in to disciplines and semesters,  is one approach for making sure that society as a whole has a similar baseline of knowledge. It isn’t the end all be all of educating. I’ve known this all for a long time, but it wasn’t until fairly recently I felt it to be true.

I’ve been out of college for almost 5 years now and I’ve continued to grow and learn new things since then. I recently read some older entries in a journal I sporadically keep and it was rewarding to see that many of the things I wanted to accomplish and learn about I’ve managed to do in two years since the date of the entry. The enthusiasm I have for learning is still there and I can come at topics with great fervor and deeply involve myself in an idea. The upside is that when my momentum begins to fade there is usually no major consequence to laying that topic to rest for awhile. I can pick up the idea a day, a week, or many months later. Nothing prevents me from going back to that topic when I’m ready to dive in again. Iteration. The time scale at which I learn things in is much longer than the semester. In fact it seems that there is no discrete unit of time to learn things. How freeing!

I will admit there is value in sustaining focus on a topic even after the initial enthusiasm begins to fade. There is something about pushing past “getting stuck” (or is that “uncomfortable, but not paralyzed”?) that is really good for the brain. I’m definitely not advocating for avoiding the hard things, but  in college many classes and many semesters felt like pushing past a wall of boredom not because a class was hard but because my brain was just done thinking about the topic. I found it incredibly frustrating to not have control over my head space at times. During my post college life I’ve discovered that there are times when I need to push past the “stuck” when I don’t have the energy, but for the most part I’ve found that I have the time and space to allow an idea to breathe. Sometimes all I need is a week off from thinking about something. A week is something not afforded to most college students. If you get a week behind in college it tends to snowball out of control until you limp across the semester finish line hoping the avalanche doesn’t outpace you.

Now that I’ve had time outside of college to learn and grow I’ve noticed that besides some content sticking with me a lot of what has stuck with me are the soft skills that are so hard to quantify: critical thinking, how to break down difficult ideas, write about ideas, talk about ideas, be curious about the world, and so much more. I know how to learn and teach myself things and I’m always learning how to get better at that too. I’ve found so much joy in learning post college and I’m learning all the time. I’m lucky to have a job that gives me the freedom to challenge myself to learn new things and try out new ideas.

I’m not sure what the future holds for me (besides the terrible feeling that I’ll be going back to school sometime in the future), but I have confidence in my ability to learn and grow. Heck, who knows, maybe by the time I need that masters I might find I enjoy being in school again…or maybe not 🙂

 

 

I’ve been struggling to write this post over the last five weeks. It was originally going to be part history and part “thank you”, but I had trouble writing a post about Andy and Jim that didn’t also include talking about Jerry and Martha. These four people (and the families they represent) go far beyond being DTLT to me. So, I dropped the history part (that was taking way too long) and made it strictly a thank you post to Andy, Jim, Jerry, and Martha.So really, this post isn’t for anyone but me and the four of them.

 

It is hard to believe that 2006, the year I started at Mary Washington as a freshman, is nearly ten years ago now. I’m sure 18 year old me would be surprised to find out that ten years down the line she’d still be in the same town because she found family here.

If I were to write a book about my journey over the last ten years it would be impossible to not talk about a few members of DTLT and their families because they are so thoroughly intertwined in my life’s story. There are so many moments that I could talk about I don’t know how I could recount them all in a single post. And how can I ever express enough gratitude for helping me get to where I am today and for all the wonderful memories? This post won’t do it justice, but it as an attempt to say a few words of thanks. For your consideration, both serious and silly thank yous.

First of all thank you for hiring me as a student aide all those years ago. I didn’t know what I was getting in to, but thanks for seeing something in the quiet and timid freshman student.

Thank you for bringing me in to the conversation. Sitting around the bullpen in DTLT allowed me to hear some of the smartest people I know talk about big ideas.

Thanks for being there for me through my darkest college days.

Thanks for the hundreds of meals you have fed me over the years. Whether it was taking me out to lunch or having me in your home for dinner. I owe more meals than I can ever repay. I plan on paying them forward.

Thank you all for letting me get to know your children. It has been an honor for me to watch them grow up. I know many of you think you aren’t perfect parents, and you’re not, but the secret is no one is, and as it turns out you are still great parents without being perfect.

Thanks for all the blog comments.

Thanks for inviting me to your kid’s shows, to outings near and far, to family gatherings, birthday parties, mother’s day and father’s day celebrations, and even family vacations. I always felt like I was part of the family when I came along.

Thanks for all the moments I laughed so hard I cried. There were many of them.

Thanks for letting me sit in DTLT at all hours of the day as a student aide. Being there often meant more to me than you knew. Although I think the times when I came in and promptly put my head on the desk was probably a sign.

Thank you for listening to my story.

Thank you for sharing your stories with me. You all come from different places and hearing your stories about where life has taken you (both the good and the bad) taught me there are many paths to fulfillment and happiness.

Thank you for all the patience you’ve shown me over the years.

Thanks for all the drinks: beer, wine, but mostly the marthinis. Okay, this is really a thank you to Martha for educating me on the superiority of gin.

Thanks for all the times you pushed me to reach further than I thought I could.

Thank you for being a friend.

Thanks for helping me through my mistakes and failures. Especially when those failures felt like the end of the world. You all reminded me life goes on and the best thing to do is learn from my mistakes.

Thanks for helping me after I graduated. Whether it was helping me edit a resume, listening to my fears over what comes next, or even convincing your spouse to let me work at her clinic 😉

Thanks for setting the bar so high.

Thanks for being the biggest influences on my young adult life. I am so incredibly blessed to have had so many amazing people in my life over the last ten years. I think I won the mentor lottery when I came to Mary Washington.

Thanks for probably be unsurprised that this blog post has taken so long to write. Hey, at least I finished it before Jim left!

Thank you. I love you all.

 

 

 

I’ve been working at the Simpson Library for almost two years now and I have tried several times to blog about the work I’ve been doing, but for several reasons I haven’t been able to bring myself to share what I am doing. I won’t say that this post is going to be a trend, but I’d like to talk through what I’ve been doing a bit more and try to let go of some of the fears that have held me back from writing.

When I hit my one year anniversary mark at the University it was summer and I took the opportunity of the summer time lull to revamp the procedures of my job. The biggest goal was to digitize as many aspects of the job as I could to not only reduce the amount of paper waste, but to also streamline the process and perhaps have a better way to collect data of what is going on.

Many of the digitization tasks were fairly straight forward. I wanted to put the handbooks and student aide training material online. I had been inspired by the work done by DTLT where they used a combination of GitHub and DokuWiki as the hub of the documentation for Domain of One’s Own. I liked this framework because content re-use is very easy in the wiki. If I have a set of procedures on a page and those procedures are used in multiple project instructions I’d only have to write the procedures once and easily embed them in other parts of the site. Additionally, if I had to update the procedures because they changed I would only need to change the original source of the procedures and that would get pushed to everyplace I had embedded those procedures. I also imagined if my wiki experiments were a success that this could extend to other departments within the library. If we shared a collective wiki we could all be on the same page for the various procedures. I ended up not using GitHub as the backbone because between all the things I wanted to accomplish over the summer I thought learning how the heck to use GitHub would take up more time than I wanted, plus I figured at this point I’d be the only one needing to update the content so the power of forking my content wasn’t necessary.

I had a volunteer (a student aide that had just graduated) take the Collection Maintenance Handbook and format it to work within the wiki markup. It was also a good opportunity for the two of us to update the manual to reflect current practices (wow, did I really change that many things in my first year?). The volunteer also helped put the training guide together and to help me think through what items I wanted to include on an introductory questionnaire. Traditionally student aides receive a training guide pamphlet that they go through with the supervisor each time they  work a shift until they are fully trained. Going from paper to electronic format made me rethink how I even wanted to approach student aide training which has led to lots of different experiments (a blog post for another day).  Additionally, if I was going to use parts of the Collection Maintenance Handbook in the training guide I had to make sure the handbook was broken up in ways that I could use those pieces in the training guide and that they were written in a way that would explain enough to student aides how the task is accomplished. It mostly came together, but it was a bit messy.

This summer I’ll be spending time looking at how well the digitization process of handbooks and training manuals went to figure out how I can tweak it further to make more sense to my students. I’ve also been doing plenty of reading on managing student aides in an academic setting and plan on taking some of the ideas and implementing them in training.

This is only the tip of the iceberg of what I’ve been doing and it didn’t even cover the biggest and most challenging digitization of the shelf checking that my student supervisor does. I’ll leave that for another post.

Ever since Martha wrote about the bullpen model that DTLT uses I’ve had this post in the back of my head. I’ve tried many times to come up with a way to talk about the influence of DTLT on my life, but I don’t think it could ever be encapsulated in one post. So, this is one attempt to talk about their influence of my life as a student and why I wish every student could get some time in a “bullpen” while they are in college.

I started working as a student aide for DTLT as a sophomore in fall of 2007 and it wasn’t hard to see right away the impact of the bullpen. From Martha’s post:

There is almost constant conversation, and, as a result, there is almost constant collaboration. It’s an incredibly dynamic, intense way to work. We see each other at our best and at our worst. We have argued around these desks; we have each at one point or another needed to leave the room because we needed to take a breather.

Sitting around the bullpen alongside the members of DTLT and watching them argue and discuss ideas helped me realize that learning is not only done in a solitude. I saw how hashing out ideas led to the creation of projects, initiatives and change. I learned many lessons in how to think and question ideas in productive ways. At some point I had that “aha!” moment where I realized, “Ah, this is how people learn to be great thinkers. They talk to each other and push each other and aren’t afraid to take positions.” It demonstrated to me that it really is okay that people have different ideas, even on the rare occasion when things get so incredibly heated someone has to leave the room, it is still okay (there is also a lesson in forgiveness and understanding in all this too).

It may seem obvious, but this was honestly a mind-blowing experience to me as a student. I vividly remember there being times when I felt true awe (a sort of brain high) after a particularly thoughtful and intense discussion. I can only speak from my experience, but the majority of my academic life up until college was spent being a passive receiver of knowledge. When I was sitting in the bullpen they demonstrated to me every day through their work and their conversations how the “life of the mind” happens. I look back on it now and think of it as form of apprenticeship. What better way to learn how to think critically about ideas and to put those ideas in to motion than to watch and interact with those who are already really good at it?

These types of interactions can’t be quantified and graded, but they are absolutely essential to becoming a well rounded individual. I wouldn’t be who I am today if I hadn’t worked for DTLT, but I can’t fit the entirety of that experience in one line on a resume. Instead their influence is seen in the ideas and the projects I come up with now. When I challenge myself and others around me to think and to try new ideas that is the influence of the bullpen shining through. So here’s to the bullpen and the myriad of people at the University who gathered in that space and transformed my life by giving me the opportunity to be a part of the conversation.