A little over a month ago, I said I was going to learn French. Well, I took longer than I expected to prepare, started later than I expected, postponed it more than I should have, and changed my strategy too often.

But that's ok. I have certainly learned more French than I ever have before. I am still slowly working on it but, what with traveling and preparing for interviews and their presentations, plus other work I have to get done, I have reduced my efforts to learn La Belle Langue quite a bit. And the workload will only get worse. What I need is some touch of formal pressure to keep up with it. Maybe a language partner, or a regular tv show or vodcast to understand, something like that. My other issue is my efforts to retain what I have tried to learn each day... with my other responsibilities and projects, I need some easy way to insert repetition of key lessons into the following 24 hours, whether it's a vocab list to carry around or a phrase to go over in my head. Something to drill something into my head until it sticks.

Learning a new language is hard. Or maybe it's just me? Anyone else have issues with this kind of thing? Any tips on making it easier?

Labels: aboutCommunication, aboutEducation, aboutHumanNature, aboutProductivity, aboutWork

 

There was an online presentation and q&a period on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009, about the proposed redesign of the primary PubMed pages. This was scheduled to be released this summer but is not up at this time yet.

My overall impression is certainly an improvement. It's a much simpler, streamlined and current design, which should ease public use and enjoyment of the product, both of which are rather important. There were the usual questions about functionality, but, as the presenter David Gillikin, Chief of NLM’s Bibliographic Services, repeatedly pointed out, this is an upgrade of design only. Strict functionality will not be touched.

Krafty Librarian points out:

Since most of the "cool" or helpful things like Details, History, Citation Matcher are only available from the Advanced Search, many people may want to have a nice short cut straight to that area.

I would have to suggest that NLM considers adding random reminders if not fixed links to tools like this in with the boxes on the right "Related Articles", "Recent Activity", etc.

I love forward to the the release of the redesign. I can't wait to play around with it and explore. It certainly welcomes a bit of curiosity and playing more than the current interface. What do you think? Are you excited?

[ "PubMed Redesign 2009" presentation, 45 min, learned of from a Krafty Librarian blog entry ]

Labels: aboutHealth, aboutInformation, aboutLibrarianship, aboutOnlineTools, aboutTechnology, aboutWeb2.0, reviews

 

I like Twitter. It's another easy way to get to know what's happening in other people's heads, what they're reading, what they think is interesting. And I get to share those things with the world too: special events, what I think is important, what I want to share with people. And it certainly doesn't hurt to be in the middle of all those swirling ideas and communications. I may even get a new idea myself one day! lol

But one twitter related phenomenon disturbs me: over-following. I guess all tools get taken into the realm of spam, misuse, commercialization, et cetera, but when supposedly "real" people using Twitter are following literally thousands of feeds... I mean, what do they think the "following" function is for? Well, maybe I've got it wrong. I think it's to read the tweets of those whose opinion you respect or are interested in in some way, those feeds that are going to inform you of something like an institution's upcoming events. You're populating a list of things to theoretically read. You may skip a few but the idea is to read a good portion of them. But when someone's following 2747 Twitter feeds, what good is that? Unless these are all very rare Tweeters, that's a lot of material even to ignore regularly.

The first thing that I think when I see that is that they are playing some sort of game. "I really need a lot of followers so I'm going to follow others so they feel like they should follow me!" I'm following 25 right now and I even consider weeding out a few now and then.

Again, maybe I'm all turned around on this. Maybe there's some Twitter tool (Twool? Gawd, I've gone over to the dark side. lol) that helps weed through the piles of Tweets that must build up. Anyone know anything about this? Hmmm...

Labels: aboutCommunication, aboutEthics, aboutHumanNature, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools, aboutProductivity, aboutReading, aboutReason, aboutSociety, aboutTechnology, aboutWeb2.0