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Month: December 2007

Birth 2.0

Published by Iris on Saturday, December 15th, 2007

Congratulations to Jason and Betsy, and welcome little Eliza!!!

This is the first birth I’ve ever followed on Twitter. I’m sure most of Jason’s 100+ followers were obsessively checking their Twitter feeds for baby updates throughout the day yesterday. I know I was. Then there was the tense 5-hour absence of updates while friends posted things like “not seeing any baby updates, hope everything’s ok,” or, “really falling asleep now, I’ll check for baby updates first thing tomorrow.” And finally, we heard that Eliza was born and everyone was doing well, and there was much rejoicing in Twitter Land.

Happy Birthday, Eliza.

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Writing with Numbers: a Faculty Workshop

Published by Iris on Friday, December 14th, 2007

Today was the last day of the annual faculty workshop sponsored by our writing program. This year we’re reprising a topic from two years ago: Writing with Numbers. The idea being that students often have minimal expertise in integrating numerical evidence into their papers regardless of whether the paper is primarily about numerical evidence or is a non-numerical paper that could nevertheless benefit from a few well-placed numbers. This is Numbers As Rhetorical Tools rather than a workshop on statistics.

On the first day John Bean (from Seattle University) walked us through the fine art of creating assignments that both encourage students to learn by grappling with problems and also learn to match their writing to various audiences. The next day, my co-worker introduced strategies and sources for find everything from census numbers to large datasets. (And by the way, she deserves a lot of credit for structuring a talk intended for an audience made up of professors from all sorts of disciplines, some of which routinely analyze huge datasets and some of which only occasionally need a population number from the census.) That day was fun because so many people had their imaginations tickled with possibilities for integrating numerical information into their course assignments.

Today the professors teamed up to revise assignments for their upcoming classes. And of course, we had our annual Sock Contest! For this contest, the Dean of the College appears and judges all of our socks to see which are the worst. There are two categories: Holiday and GodAwful. (Though many people spanned the two.) I won last year in the Holiday division for some truly ghastly Santa socks, but this year I dug through my drawers only to find that I’d already thrown away the shocking-green-and-orange shaggy socks that I wore constantly as a kid. Ah well… the world is probably a better place without having to see those socks.

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Search is Search

Published by Iris on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

Yesterday, an Academic Technologist, another librarian, and I joined forces to lead a workshop called “Finding Your Stuff in Zimbra.” The technologists thought there should be a session on email searching, and they figured librarians must know a thing or two about search, and so this session was spawned.

The session itself was fairly uneventful. I put together a guide to Zimbra’s rather impressive search capabilities (probably Zimbra’s best quality). For example, did you know that it’s possible to keyword search inside your attachments using this system? I didn’t either until preparing for this session, but it’s pretty darn cool. Anyway, we walked attendees through these capabilities, and then we discussed what to do if people knew they’d want to gather messages that were related but had no common metadata: create tags and/or folders. For example, I have tags or folders for things like gathering messages from students, since no message metadata exists to indicate whether or not the message sender is a student.

Two things surprised me about leading this session. First, people came! About 2/3 of the room was full, and they would have stayed past our alloted hour if people hadn’t been congregating outside the classroom door in anticipation of the next workshop. Second, people want us to offer it again. I would never have guessed. Never.

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The Night Oscar Crooned

Published by Iris on Saturday, December 8th, 2007

Last night I went to a hangar dance — one of those dances held in airport hangars where lots of people dress in WWII era clothes and dance to WWII era music… or just show up and swing dance. The evening could have been a disaster. The music was too slow (even when we requested upbeat music, they played it at half speed), and even though most of my favorite dancers were there the bitter cold seems to have kept most people away.

And yet we managed to have a really good time anyway. For one thing, the trombone player looked and acted exactly like Oscar Madison from the Odd Couple. He sat slouched in his chair with his legs crossed in that lazy middle-aged-man way and improvised his way through an entire evening of music. Once he even took the microphone and crooned to us in a most Oscar-like way. As we sat on the sidelines and waited for dance-able music, we’d do Oscar imitations and send ourselves into stitches. “I want you out of here, Felix! Out!”

Another highlight was having somebody who’d been there for the dinner portion of the night come up to me and ask the name of our dance troupe. We all danced so well, she said, that she thought we were affiliated with a reenactment group. Cool! I’ve been mistaken for a professional dancer!!

But what really saved the evening from being a $10/3-hour-round-trip/bad-music disaster was the group of people I got to hang out with. If you have to sit out 8 out of every 10 dances, it sure helps if you’re sitting out with a bunch of really fun people.

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