Lost It
I hadn't realized that this blog had been getting any traffic until this morning when Robert mentioned he felt a little guilty that he hadn't posted anything yet. I looked at him a bit dumbfounded and asked, "There have been posts on the blog??" Duh. Boy, I felt really out of it. I have been so wrapped up in my own day-to-day issues, that I completely forgot to check the blog. I also found that I didn't have a bookmark to the blog and had to open an old email message to find the URL. Then I had to send in a request for a password reminder to blogger.com because I had forgotten the password I set for this blog. It seemed like a lot of barriers to overcome (my own memory being the biggest) in order to start participating. I realize I have come to rely on information coming directly to me through email or instant messaging, and have fallen out of the habit of taking myself to the information in order to participate. I need to find out if I can get the blog to send me email notifications, or copies of the posts via email, when something is posted. That is what will get me to be a regular. I can't depend on my memory, and it will take me some time to develop a routine that keeps me here.
I remember as an undergraduate and a graduate student on this campus, that I would often go to the library to browse, read, research. I worked in the Modern Languages and Linguistics Library for a few years and helped patrons find books, journals, articles, etc. all the time. This was before the Library had the abundance of webified resources. Back then, people had to navigate the online catalog with strange search booleans and several different databases.
Nowadays, I pretty much use the Internet exclusively for searching for any books. If I need help, I use the library chat. I've not been to the library to work or search for many years. I pretty much only go there when I have meetings scheduled there. I do miss the library. I love the feeling I get in the library. My curiosity is way up, I lose a sense of time, and I have a great urge to sit down to write my own book. I do think the library is a community-building space. For a lot of undergraduates, you go to the library for the social networking. It's interesting that as we "grow up" and mature in our studies, we go to the library to be isolated. As a graduate student, people knew you were a serious student if you had a study carrel reserved for your use in the Stacks. You could surround yourself with knowledge that you hoped to absorb and resynthesize into new knowledge.
The Learning Commons is the glue that can attract students to the libary and to services designed for them when access to online resources gives them reasons to stay at home. I like it that we are admitting the social importance of space like the Undergraduate library and designing it to excel for that purpose. What intriques me even more is that through the design, we can make the other resources and services designed for students become an organic part of the space. Just like having information come to me in my email, where I happen to be every day to do my work, having a tighter presentation of the resources for students delivered to them in their social/study space will keep them aware of the information and, thus, more likely to use it. We may finally have a wormhole, if you will, that can transport students to new parts of the knowledge universe.
Okay, when I start thinking about Star Trek metaphors, it is probably time to turn my attention to another topic for awhile.
I remember as an undergraduate and a graduate student on this campus, that I would often go to the library to browse, read, research. I worked in the Modern Languages and Linguistics Library for a few years and helped patrons find books, journals, articles, etc. all the time. This was before the Library had the abundance of webified resources. Back then, people had to navigate the online catalog with strange search booleans and several different databases.
Nowadays, I pretty much use the Internet exclusively for searching for any books. If I need help, I use the library chat. I've not been to the library to work or search for many years. I pretty much only go there when I have meetings scheduled there. I do miss the library. I love the feeling I get in the library. My curiosity is way up, I lose a sense of time, and I have a great urge to sit down to write my own book. I do think the library is a community-building space. For a lot of undergraduates, you go to the library for the social networking. It's interesting that as we "grow up" and mature in our studies, we go to the library to be isolated. As a graduate student, people knew you were a serious student if you had a study carrel reserved for your use in the Stacks. You could surround yourself with knowledge that you hoped to absorb and resynthesize into new knowledge.
The Learning Commons is the glue that can attract students to the libary and to services designed for them when access to online resources gives them reasons to stay at home. I like it that we are admitting the social importance of space like the Undergraduate library and designing it to excel for that purpose. What intriques me even more is that through the design, we can make the other resources and services designed for students become an organic part of the space. Just like having information come to me in my email, where I happen to be every day to do my work, having a tighter presentation of the resources for students delivered to them in their social/study space will keep them aware of the information and, thus, more likely to use it. We may finally have a wormhole, if you will, that can transport students to new parts of the knowledge universe.
Okay, when I start thinking about Star Trek metaphors, it is probably time to turn my attention to another topic for awhile.
posted by Leslie at 10:44 AM
2 Comments:
I highly recommend a blog reader (like Bloglines) for being able to keep up on new postings, saving items you want to refer to again, etc. If you are a regularly user of RefWorks (http://www.library.uiuc.edu/refworks/) you could also set up a feed within it to send you the new posts but it isn't particularly optimized for reading postings. But, it's an option. I myself use Bloglines and really like being able to use a spare minute here and there to do a bit of reading on different blogs.....
I stole the blog's "email post" and now get the posts emailed to me, and I am very, very happy. Sincy my email is already in front of me, this is a more natural way for me to stay in the loop.
By the way, I do use NetNewsWire as my feed aggregator. But as I mentioned before, I would rather get the email because then the blog becomes part of my normal workflow and isn't another technology that I have to incorporate into my workflow. And like Lanny, I like to follow the links, and to do that the aggregator will open a browser anyway. (I use a browser-based email reader, so I am already in the medium when I am reading the posts.)
Anyway, things are just hunky-dorey for me now. :-)
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