End of another semester already?

As the end of another semester approaches, it seerms like it was just yesterday that I began graduate studies. Has anyone else noticed how fast time seems to fly as we age? When I was a child, I was terribly impatient. I couldn't wait for school years to get over. I couldn't wait to grow up. I couldn't wait to find a job and a spouse and start a family and build a career. Now that I've been there and done all that, it seems like all of life is going by so fast that I can't keep up.
Okay. So when I was in college the first time around (as an undergrad), I had trouble keeping up with everything, too. Only I don't always remember things that way. Memory is a tricky thing, and I usually remember the "good old days" as better than the current times. But that's just faulty memory at work. Now that I'm older (okay, now that I'm really old), I'm more aware of what is going on around me. Life taught me to pay attention to details. And I do pay attention to details. I don't blow off things as unimportant or insignificant the way I did as a teenager or younger adult.
So what has really changed in my perception of time is a growing awareness that there are more details worthy of my attention.
As an experienced researcher and published writer, I'm more aware of how important getting those details right in a paper or article or book can be. I pay attention to those details and someimes lose sleep over them.
I am aware that this semester won't be over until I complete two more research papers and submit them to my professors. I am aware that I only have one more week to get all of those details straight in my mind and down on paper (or commited to pixels). I am acutely aware of the pressure of time as I organize and reorganize the arguments of each paper in my mind. It's exciting--thrilling!--and a little scary.
It's what I love to do.
Facing deadline pressures doesn't get much easier with age, but it does seem so very familiar that it's become almost comforatble. Kind of like an old friend or a favorite book. Almost.
Anyway, it's that time again: the end of the semester when all of what I learned in a class is reflected in a paper--proof positive that I did learn something. I must produce such proof for each of my classes. And the papers are both due at the same time.
It's like possessing a split personality to produce two separate and distinct papers on diverse subjects. Or maybe it's like multi-tasking.
Whatever it's like, it'll be over in another week. Then I can go back to being normal.
Normal, at least, until the summer semester begins in June.
Then the craziness begins all over again.
I have purchased some of my textbooks for summer classes, and I gave Amazon.com $239.00 for one class. I don't know what the texts are or how much they will cost for my other summer class.

New Semester Happenings

Spring is just around the corner. It is the spring semester at WUM, and the weather outside is finally beginning to look more springlike. The sun is shining, the snow is melting, and the spring equinox is only weeks away (and St Patty's day coming right up).

I'm heading off to Arizona for spring break this year: classes in Sedona and Pheonix, and touristy things in Flagstaff, Gallup (NM), and the Grand Canyon. I'll take ten days off from my practicum at Rasmussen to fly out to Phoenix. Then Gretta and I will rent a car and drive all over the state catching the rays of the sun and forgetting all about work and school. We'll culminate our journey with 2 days of hypnosis classes in Sedona that include chronic pain management and hypnotic treatment for PTSD sufferers. Then we return to Phoenix and catch a flight back home in time for Easter.

Snow Day

In the twenty-some years I've worked in libraries, the libraries I've worked at have closed fewer than half-a-dozen times--until this year. Rockford Public Library has closed twice in the past week! This is unheard of in the annals of RPLdom. There are hundreds of homeless depending on the library being open. There are countless people with questions waiting to find answers. How dare the library close!
But the administration jus announced that the library will close tonight at 5:00 PM due to the blizzard-like conditions.

Happy holidays!

The end of the beginning

I've enjoyed reading all of the summations on my colleagues' (classmates') blogs, and I wanted to do something spectacular for refdeskpaul to celebrate the end of the semester. But this is not the end, merely the beginning, for refdeskpaul, and it seems kind of silly to list each of the 23 things and what I learned from each of them during the past 16 weeks.
I am, however, so very glad that I have learned the hands-on basics for web 2.0 by actually doing each of the 23 things: I learned the theory of web 2.0 in other classes, but this has been an exceptional learning experience because I have had to actually apply what I have learned. Being a Piagetian constructionist at heart, I firmly believe we learn best by coordinating sequences of neuronal firings in multiple parts of the brain simultaneously--employing motor neurons in hand-eye coordination, exercising verbal (and actual speech) neurons in constructing letters and symbols and words, neurons in the corpus callosum that coordinate the two hemispheres of the brain and allow cross-talk to happen between the left and right brains, etc. That happened in this class because of the "realness" of blogging for each other in real time. We all had to use parts of our brains in new ways. Now that we know how to do all of these things (way more than 23 things), we'll continue to build new learning on top of the base we constructed in this class. So I intend to continue blogging on RefdeskPaul. This is only the beginning....

Reference Resources Wiki

I have started a Reference resources Wiki at . Come and join me at http://referenceresources.wikispaces.com/ and join the conversation about full-text reference resources available online.

Checking all the new places I've visited in this class

In preparation for summing up the 2300+ things I've learned in this class, I went to http://www.checkusername.com/ and entered refdeskpaul. I discovered I've registered this blog or used the blog's username to create accounts at Blogger, Diigo, Flickr, Hellotxt, Livejournal, Myspace, stumbleupon, technorati, tinyurl, tumblr, twitter, vi.sualize.us, Yahoo, and YouTube. But that's not nearly half of the web 2.0 places I've visited or where I've created new accounts because of this class. This has been a super learning experience.

Gave you see All My Faves. yet? http://allmyfaves.com/ offers logoized links to all of the web 2.0 sites, including 43 Things. Check them out!

Digital Media Blog

Great site: http://spotlight.macfound.org/