I’ve enjoyed the Coursera Python MOOC so far, though I didn’t end up with a local—or even a distance—cohort of people taking it with me. Things have been kind of hectic, both at work and with outside projects and medical stuff, and I ended up doing the homework on Saturday,…
My last post was a serious downer, and I apologize for that. I debated skipping the medical stuff, but I really felt like I needed to justify my decision to back out of ALA—if not to everyone else, then at least to myself. (And enough people have asked “What did…
About class (and teaching/learning programming): In Week 1 we covered functions, the modulo operator, comparisons, and if/elif/else. They offer a tool called “Pystep,” where you can see functions being evaluated. I am not sure whether it is actually more helpful or more confusing to someone who is unfamiliar with programming,…
Or something like that. (It’s a possible mis-quote of my department head. He was trying to make me feel better with this statement, and it was surprisingly effective.) This is the story of Librarians Build Communities (LBC) in Alaska. To jog your memory: LBC is an advocacy program, where librarians…
While I’m not the first to tackle librarianship and identity, by a [very very] long shot, it’s on my mind right now. Earlier this week I was told to train a new part-time reference librarian (<grumpy>with not a lot of warning</grumpy>). Training someone to do reference in this library is…
I just signed up for Tabatha Farney’s and Nina McHale’s day-long Midwinter pre-conference, “Developing a Web Analytics Strategy for Your Library: Using Data to Measure Success.” I’m pretty psyched, since 1) I respect both of the presenters, and 2) my use of Google Analytics thus far has been somewhat lackadaisical.…
I have so many real posts queued up—some of them are even started! But I’m on what I hope is the tail end of a super hectic, um, year. I’ll share some quick news, though (bolded for quick scanning), because I want to tell folks about the things that are…
I’m not a huge fan of the Beloit College Mindset List–not because it isn’t fun and interesting, but because I think there are people who take it seriously and believe it will help them relate to “kids these days,” when they could probably use it just as well to relate…
I know I e-signed the pledge to blog every day for reverb10, but I don’t actually want to try the patience of my (I suspect fairly few, after multiple digital moves last year) readers by writing poorly thought out posts for no better reason than “I said I’d blog.” You…
I’ve been tapped to give a 1.5-2 hour presentation to a group of Alaskan public library directors. (This sounds very impressive for a newbie librarian, but here’s the full disclosure: their original half-day speaker had to cancel, and then their backup speaker also canceled. Now there are several local librarians…
