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

I have been playing World of Warcraft for a while now. Just as with everything in my life, I try to tie it somehow to librarianship. I've thought about ways that I could look into and write about the information seeking behaviours of WoW players, what a service providing information in-game would or could be like, or the imagery and perceptions of books, libraries and librarians that exists within the game.

There are others connecting World of Warcraft (and other games or virtual environments) to something academic. Wow.com had an interesting interview last month with a professor of anthropology at the Inver Hills Community College in Minnesota who has created and offered a class entitled: "Warcraft: Culture, Gender and Identity". Beyond teaching students about some important cultural concepts in an environment they all know and enjoy already, this course also provided a chance to show how a gaming world like WoW can be used in teaching, which seems to be a slowly but surely growing trend.

What do you think? Is this an appropriate connection? Do games and software like these provide enough complexity or an appropriate venue to learn from?

(For those of you who may not have "got" my poor attempt at humour in the title, watch this.)

Labels: aboutEducation, aboutGaming, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools

For what feels like years, I've had an item in my to do list that I've managed to continually postpone despite the fact that I was so gung-ho when I wrote it down. Learn something new. I know, as a librarian I'm always doing that but I wanted it to be an active, concrete task that chose. Each month (crazy, huh?). I even made a list that has quite a few items on it, ranging in specificity from the incredibly broad and vague (e.g. Health.) to the painfully narrow (e.g. Learn the basics about "canonical discriminant analysis".).

My idea was that I would systematically add skills and content to my repertoire that would help me in my work, my profession and my life in general. But it's hard to do! With time constraints, chores at home, kids running around, and a billion other potential projects waiting for my attention, I have yet to sit down and choose something for my "month of learning".

But today was different. I chose something. French. Ok, not everything. I don't expect to become fluent. Just the basics. I remember a good deal of my high school French classes. I'm Canadian (that's got to count for something). And it's in my blood - my grandfather is fluent and very French-Canadian. My goal will be some basic (re)understanding of the fundamentals of grammar, a handle on accurate pronunciation, and a small but practical vocabulary. Perhaps enough to visit Quebec or France and not have to hope that someone speaks English! lol

Any self-directed learning plans of your own? Have you had any difficulties getting them accomplished, or even started? How have you solved them, or have you? Any ideas?

P.S. Oh and my deadline is actually August 1st so I actually have less than a month but I wanted my repeating task (of choosing a new something to learn) to be scheduled for the first of each month.

Labels: aboutEducation, aboutProductivity

I taught a few sessions of a "keeping current" workshop that I put together for work a while ago which was mostly/usually about what RSS is and how you can use it in your current awareness strategy instead of subscribing to and NOT reading dozens of print journals. But while I was teaching these sessions, a recurring theme arose.

Finding information's not the problem. We all know that "If I only knew/read/skimmed everything in this book/journal/website/etc that would really help my job/research/homework/relationship/parenting/etc." There is enough information out there -- factual or not, professional or not, valuable or not -- to satisfy every individual need for knowing more about whatever they want to know about. The key is in choosing what "stream" to follow, or float down rather. You have to be pretty selective about what you're going to be tracking regularly. There's a lot of content out there but there's also a lot of overlap. What one Corvette expert has to say on a regular basis will repeat much of what another has to say. You can't listen to them all.

Well, actually, you can almost. If you narrow down your focus enough, you can still keep pretty good tabs on all the "experts" in a field. But then you can't do anything else. You can be yet another expert on the topic of marsh hens but when someone asks you about guineafowl you'll be stumped. Of course, if you don't focus at all, you'll be reading about a million and one topics and not get enough depth to be of value in any of them.

The best path is right down the middle. Make a list of your primary interests and primary specialties and focus on them. Read some books, read some blogs, search for some current articles on each of your main topics and do so with some regularity.

And remember to shut it off once in a while. Dive into something completely new once in a while. Or turn it all off and have a break. You'll be amazed at what bubbles to the surface when the turbines are turned off or pointed in another direction.

So what do you folks do to "keep up"?

Labels: aboutEducation, aboutInformation, aboutReading

From Tomorrow's Professor Blog, I read an article about the current push for universities to offer 3 year undergraduate degree programs instead of, or in addition to, the standard 4 year programs. The claim is that it will save money, both for the institution and for the student, get people into the work force faster, and result in a more streamlined, "fuel-efficient" education system.

Bah, I say. As soon as I read this, I hung my head in despair. This is not the direction we need to be going. On a biological level, there's an inborn need for more formative years (i.e. more education of immature individuals in the species... not intended as an insult lol) the more complex the lifestyle or society the individual is born into. Everyone seems to be saying that life is much more complex now, and is getting more so... There are simply more things to learn and more specialized nooks for people to fit themselves into. We don't want less educated generalists, generally - we want better trained, better educated, more mature workers. Actually, we need everyone to be more educated generally, I think.

I have to reveal my bias in this of course. I am a librarian in a university, and although I think our library, serving our faculty, within our university helps the students (and staff and faculty) more than average, I still don't think we have enough time with them. We are integrated into their classes almost entirely but we still see the vast majority of the students about 3-4 hours for formal education sessions in information literacy throughout their time here. For a subject and skill set that most people don't think is useful or think they have already (wrong on both counts), this is hardly enough time to change their opinions AND teach them what they need to know. Shortening the time some of them are in university, will simply decrease our time with them, and increase the pressure of the faculty members to give us even less.

As it says in the article, "the push for three years [is] coming from those whose ideas about higher ed amount to: 'get it over with and get it over with fast.'" Yes. In all likelihood, shortening the amount of time students are required to spend in higher education would be cheaper all round. But so would not attending university at all! That's not the direction we want to be going. Honestly, our education system here in Canada and the United States is not perfect. But cutting the time in it is not the answer. More time might be. At least, better teaching strategies and an improved societal atmosphere of "education is a good thing" would help. And more money too. Cutting funds from higher education just destroys all the work that we have done in the past several years to improve our teaching as it is.

The funniest part of the article is the quote from Richard Vedder saying that "Thomas Jefferson's two-year program at the College of William and Mary didn't stunt his intellectual growth." Ignoring the tiring habit of Americans to bring up their founding fathers every chance they get, couldn't Thomas Jefferson be an exception? And besides, I think the almost 250 years since Mr. Jefferson graduated has seen a few developments that may make even a general liberal arts degree require a little more effort. LOL

934 The Buzz and Spin on 3-Year Degrees (via Tomorrow's Professor Blog, RSS feed)

Labels: aboutEducation, aboutMoney