Seeing Through New Eyes

There are still two more tracks of presentations and the closing keynote, but I want to write down my impressions and thoughts from the last two full days of JCDL 2011 . I have thoroughly enjoyed both keynote addresses. I feel like there are many of the paper presentations I have attended I want to read now. It's nice that as one of the attendees I received a copy of each paper. The first keynote, Daniel Caron a Canadian Librarian and Archivist, spoke about many ideas for libraries. He didn't say anything I hadn't heard before, but a few things were said in a different way that got me thinking. My favorite nugget was, "information managers act as waste managers". He basically meant that information specialists receive so much stuff from people that they have to wade through it all and pull out the nuggets that are actually worth keeping (whereas most of the information really isn't). The value of materials is different and there should be criteria for what ...

I am finding it difficult to stay ahead of everything I find to read. There certainly is a large amount of literature being published about problem-based learning, education in general, science education, inquiry, 21st century skills, digital libraries, and teacher professional development. Curious to know what other people do to carve out time for reading. Looking for some good strategies.

It has been a crazy couple of months. I successfully defended my dissertation at the end of April, allowing me to walk for graduation the next week in May. I had an absolutely amazing committee and really appreciate all their hard work on my behalf. I am working on my revisions and would have them finished by now except I moved my family last week to a new state for a new job. With that, today I had the opportunity to be a research participant in a cool study that is looking at the activity in the brain when an individual is silently reading words and asked to comprehend the sentences to answer questions. I am excited to see the results, which I should because the faculty member doing the study has an office next to my boss. You can read more about him here: http://psych.colorado.edu/~aakim/ . I left work today with bits of gel in my hair that they used with the cap on my head. But beyond that, I am really enjoying my post-doc position at the University of Colorado-Boulder.