Tools for good collaboration, tools for success as an online student

I recently watched a video of a presentation given by Dr. Haycock, the former director of SJSU's SLIS. I really like the part of the video where he points out that group work is valued for its collaboration but not for its conflict, the latter of which is as inherent to the process as the former. In my experience with group work, I am usually afraid of conflict--I want the energy to be positive and for there to be no ill will between group members. I am also afraid of being disliked. However, I think that, with the establishing of ground rules and consistently enforcing those ground rules, it is better to call out discrepancies or disrespectful behavior, which will lead to productivity and efficiency. This appeals to my sense of justice and equality, as well as my tendency to be opinionated. I also really liked his advice on what I would call nonviolent communication, with the communication formula going like this: When you... I feel... Would you consider... By combining the attitude that conflict is normal and can be productive with the tool for communicating effectively, I think group work will be much more tolerable--and even generative!--that I had expected it to be.

Haycock's speech on group/team/committee work was very informative
and should be required watching for all library staff people.
Click here to watch it yourself. 

My plan to be a successful online student is a combination of time management and schedule. I intend to check D2L on a daily basis and to limit how much time I can spend on any given unit or concept. I have anxious tendencies in my personalty, which in this case may be beneficial: if I let myself go a whole weekend without logging into D2L, I get antsy and nervous. Might as well eliminate that problem by sticking with my schedule of checking D2L everyday. On the other hand, I can be obsessive about being thorough and gathering information. For example, even if I am really into creating my blog for this course, I need to put a limit on how much time and energy I spend on designing the interface, creating the name, specializing it with widgets, perfecting the voice of my first post, etc...

Bookish By Nature

A bookish blog for a biblio bebé, I'm back in a library and I'm starting a graduate program to become an official librarian. I spent a year away from my library but couldn't stay away from libraries; I visited them in New York, Buenos Aires, on a cargo ship in the Atlantic, Amsterdam, Berlin, Philadelphia... in my time away a few things grew very clear in the landscape of my opinions: a library does not exist without physical books; the best libraries are those that librarians do not grip too tightly in their need for control and order; I may have fallen into a career in libraries but fate tripped me: I'm bookish by nature. 

Amsterdam Public Library:
#1 in the Netherlands, #1 in the world 

And how about information? I crave it, and I choose the nutritional internet when we're talking digital. Philosophically I could discuss prosthetic knowledge as it applies to information science for a while (knowing how to find information is more important that actually knowing the information), yet facts and methods and themes swim through my mind screen at random: putting myself on a digital information diet was the wisest thing I've done. I pretty much unilaterally reject BuzzFeed, xoJane, and Facebook. I choose my trusted sources and I seek my information from those places while continuously scrutinizing their slant, each source's tone, each one's gimmick. I admit I am addicted to the internet; aren't we all? Have you ever seen Tiffany Schlain's film called Connected: An Autoblogography? Twitter, running ProQuest searches, looking for high res images on Google, all of it literally gives you an uptick of dopamine similar to eating a piece of chocolate, smoking a cigarette, doing a line of cocaine... My approach to consuming information could be likened to an omnivore that insists on locally raised organic meat: I'm gonna do it and I'm gonna enjoy the heck out of it, but it's gonna be quality and guilt free.

The library of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam:
library porn, basically 

To further rely on this metaphor, I will graze on printed matter indiscriminately all day, and in this way I relate to the narrator of Camus's The Stranger: I too would read the same half torn newspaper story a million times if stuck in a prison cell. I want to run my fingers over a hardback's paper weight, inspect the binding (double fan adhesive bound? saddle stitched?), smell the ink, study the font, inspect the dust jacket's inside flap matter... bored on a public bus, I will snatch up the very dirtiest scraps of the SF Chronicle and scan the headlines... idly eating an afternoon snack, I will peruse the weekly circular ads, judge their graphic design team's use of color, font, grid, and flow. And to focus: when we talk books, we talk content, we talk typography, graphic design, engineering... we could talk books forever...  those beautiful multidimensional carriers of civilization—Thoreau got it right...