How do you teach students to keep up to date with scholarly communications, and the role of specialisation and collaboration?

I had a stab at it last study period with two separate assessments. In the first, students monitored CAUL, plus two other sources different to their classmates. One organisation and one individual from a provided list. Students wrote a review of each source and its outputs, plus identified three Wicked Problems.

Then, in the second assessment, they shared their research with other team members. The team then presented collaboratively live to “CAUL” (me wearing a nice woollen suit top in Zoom) about a single Wicked Problem. They built two possible future scenarios and suggested strategies.

My first class of students absolutely aced the assessment, which was a big relief. I was so proud of the way they stepped up and intelligently discussed the more interesting and contentious side of scholarly communications while showing really solid grasp of the basic concepts.

The Twitter lists they chose from are below, along with embedded widgets of a combined feed in the live blog post. Sources were initially found via Twitter request, and this blog post will probably be discovered via Twitter.

For the first two lists, candidates needed to be:

• mainly writing about scholarly communications
• actively posting on Twitter regularly
• different from others on the list in scope and focus
• not already contributing to the course as industry mentors

That left me with a lot of really useful other sources. Some too similar to others on the list, or hadn’t posted for a while. Hence the third list.

Are there any obvious extra accounts or people you would add for students this study period?

• Schol Com Orgs for Au – key organisations relevant to Australia.
• Schol Com people for Au – key personal accounts relevant to Australia. This will include personal non-scholarly communications tweets.
• Bonus Schol Com for Au – useful but not on main lists to select sources for assessment.

Schol Com Orgs for Au

A Twitter List by Infoventurer

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Schol Com people for Au

A Twitter List by Infoventurer

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Bonus Schol Com for Au

A Twitter List by Infoventurer

Presciently, when planning my week off, I wrote in my calendar ”Day in Bed. Do Nothing. Rest” for today.

That was just the right thing to do.
I even levelled up.
I had people over for dinner last night and had half a chocolate cake left over.

So, today was stay in bed and eat nothing but chocolate cake day.

That worked.

I have moved three times in the last 16 months. Discarding, prioritising, re-making, doing without, packing essentials, forming new habits and ways to do the previously familiar and automatic.

It clarified what’s important. What do I have to make sure is set up, thriving, before I can feel at home?

Turns out it’s this. Things growing. Things green. Either beautiful or edible, and most often both.

I had my balcony planned out, how I would stop my pots leaking on the street below, whether fake grass is really, really tacky… and had bought what I needed to set up before I had even thought about where I would put the fridge and whether my bed would fit in my bedroom.

This is just half my balcony garden :

Get this bit right for me, so I can look on it from most angles inside, and everything can fall gently into place around it.

I stopped posting BlogJune posts for a couple of days because rather than say something incredibly boring, I decided to not post at all.

The world doesn’t need extra words that are not charming, engaging and make you think or laugh or feel …

Or maybe, just maybe… in year three of a pandemic on the tailend of a large spike in work and moving house, it would be OK to be honest here.

I’m pretty burnt out.

I tried to answer a friend’s email last night and spent 10 minutes staring at the screen trying to add usual social chit-chat pleasantry to the message along with the info bit we were discussing. I didn’t even have that in the tank. I even tried to write something about how I had just spent ten minutes staring at the email before pressing send.. BUT..I just ended up instead with a very short, to-the-point polite and utilitarian message, but without the usual character and friendliness.

After midnight I was trying to totally rewrite the scenario for one of my assessments, to make it clearer so that part of the Study Period would be easier for me, the markers and my students. After half an hour and less than one paragraph completed, I just copied and pasted back the text I used last delivery. It’s good enough, and I published that version for the Sunday deadline today.

A few weeks ago, when I felt under a lot of stress, partly because I felt just so sad and helpless in the face of so many of my students and their families getting sick, I asked my line manager for a meeting to let her know “I’m OK at the moment, but maybe at the risk of being not OK”. It was a conscientious due-diligence kind of thing, “gee, I’d better let my manager know about this in case I fall over”.

It was reassuring, with a little dose of “entering new territory slightly more disturbing”, when she shared that most people she sees seem to be not OK right now. I wasn’t doing something to my students accidentally because I was stressed. Her estimate was that usually about 30% of students are struggling academically because of life-stress, but right now it is around 70%. I genuinely had thought that not only were things really busy and involved in my life, but on top of that my teaching had become dreadful and I was somehow making students perform badly academically.

I am taking a week off to unpack my box room to turn it into an office. Of course in the first couple of days here I planted broad bean seeds in my balcony garden and the plants are already about 4cm high. Priorities! I will do another “eat my garden” blogjune series in the next week or so. I have four fruit trees, and eggplant with five big fruit on it, herbs and spinach and flowers and lots of little seedlings growing.

But – today was an on the couch afternoon reading about burnout and perfectionism and not flogging myself, but trying to work out strategies. (Probably something is wrong when you are working until 1 or 2am many nights to do a job you are paid to do in 37.5 hours a week. Even if it is a job with an acknowledged uneven and seasonal workload fluctuation…with a culture of precarious employment and reward for overwork).

If you are looking for something useful, with some nice ways of looking at burnout during a pandemic, I recommend this. [It is on a site that appears to be run by a venture capital company, has no author attribution or date, so not what I would encourage my Info Retrieval students to rely on, but still… the info in it is pretty useful and it has some nice anec-data]

• A manager’s guide to helping teams face down uncertainty, burnout and perfectionism. (2022). First Round Review. Retrieved June 19, 2022, from https://review.firstround.com/a-managers-guide-to-helping-teams-face-down-uncertainty,-burnout-and-perfectionism

I particularly felt for my poor line manager, being susceptible to what the article refers to as “burnout burnout”… what happens when you are in a position where you support a whole lot of people who are getting burnt out.

So, having fallen off the wagon with BlogJune, I am going to commit to writing a something each day, whether it is any good or not. Unless, of course, that is just one more way of striving for perfectionism when taking a break would be better for me…

I have gone to ground for a couple of days while I set up all my course online sites and outlines to meet the Sunday night publishing deadline.

I pre-populate all my weekly Zoom sessions for the entire delivery, and embed them in my course site. That’s three courses times ten weeks. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but there are many, many, many mouseclicks to complete each one.

It’s late.

I have chocolate.

I just set up a Zoom session to last 180 days instead of 180 minutes.

There is a new definition of Hell, and I have just found it…

Quick response to today’s June Question before bed.

I procrastinate, but value it.

I have learned, through hanging out with me for all my life, that sometimes I need more time for something to sink in and to work out the best way to do something. I can feel really impatient when I seem to be delaying something with a deadline, but have learned that sometimes I am simply processing. Trying to complete it too early results in it being done at the same time as it would have if I waited, but with more time spent on doing it.

In some ways I am an anti-procrastinator. I have never known anyone who pays their bills as quickly as I do. As soon as I get notification, it is paid, probably within 20 minutes. Maybe it is a control thing – yep, tick that one off… NEXT! Maybe it means I don’t even have to think about it any more?

I do spend a lot of time budgeting and making sure I have money to pay bills, though. Every week I tweak the 15 or so different ”buckets”, which are separate accounts I have set aside for different parts of my budget. Buckets that are autopaid from my income each week, so I don’t ever see funds before they get there. Petrol, parking, bicycle parts are only bought from the “Transport” account, which has a small set amount deposited each week. I can overspend, but I have to then take funds from one of my other ”buckets” – groceries, health, fun, etc. to make up for it. I do it the week that the overspend happens, sometimes taking a little bit from several buckets and just doing with less for that week. I have done this forever and remember one time when I was at uni when I finally had enough money in my clothing account to pay for winter boots, when my car needed new tyres. Tyres!

When I put solar panels on my roof in Fremantle, I set up a new ”bucket” where I put a small amount each week until I had paid myself back for that expense. When I joined the gym, I paid a year’s subscription, but I pay a weekly amount to myself so that when I need to pay again next year I already have the funds. Likewise when I moved interstate, I worked out how much it cost and paid back a weekly amount until I had paid that back. My latest loan to myself? My new bucket? A big vet bill. That will take a while to pay off.

I think that doing it this way means I am less likely to procrastinate about potential purchases. The question stops being ”can I afford this?” and becomes ”what other things would I be willing not to fund to have this?” and ”just how long would I be OK to reduce funding in other areas to pay this off?”

Like Con, I am busy.

I still am enjoying the #blogjune posts floating around. As with every year, I want to keep reading posts, which means keeping my side of the deal, and making posts here.

I am drafting a post about algorithmic cheating in university, but that will take more brain space than I have right now..

So, here is what I have been repeating for the last ten weeks. Memorise these two phrases and you too can pass the courses I teach. It feels like I have said them to every single student, individually and as a class. More than once. Much more for many students.

For Information Retrieval.

Work out the informational need here. Then remember audience and purpose for what you are creating.

Or:

Audience & purpose. Audience & purpose. Audience & purpose.

For Scholarly Communications:

To support scholarly communications, librarians specialise and collaborate.

Or:

Specialisation & collaboration. Specialisation & collaboration. Specialisation & collaboration.

[In other words, you don’t need to know it all. You will know some bits. Other people will know other bits. You need to work together, communicate, share what you know, be prepared to ask humbly about the bits you don’t know.]

Thanks to Andrew, who is answering almost all of the JuneQuestions this month for inspiration to answer today’s.

I am grateful for the social change that has happened in my lifetime.

I benefited from the tail end of the Whitlam government’s fee-free tertiary education policy. It lasted just over a decade. People who could not have afforded higher education, who were first in family, rural (hi!) not only started enrolling in university courses. They found out that they could do just as well in the environment as people born to it. Which meant maybe… just maybe… other venues that excluded us were not impenetrable either?

[Portrait of Henri Groulx. Libraries and Archives of Canada http://central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.redirect?app=fonandcol&id=3194087&lang=eng ]

When I walk down the street, enter enclosed rooms, ride on a bus, travel in an aeroplane I am not now constantly covered by a cloud of someone else’s cigarette smoke that makes my asthma flare so that I cough nonstop. It is very, very rare that I even see anyone smoking in public now.

My aunt was a school teacher who worked for the state education department in the 1960s. She earned far less than male school teachers doing identical jobs. She married. She lost her permanent job. Had to resign. As all female teachers who married did.

Until 1985, in the state I lived in, a woman could be forced to have sex without consent by her husband and THERE WAS NO LEGAL PENALTY. Rape was only criminalised if you were not married to the victim.

When I look across the rooftops out my window, more than half the rooves have solar panels on them, generating renewable energy.

The faces of people I pass on the streets are not only white, white, white, white. Models advertising products on buses that drive past are not only white, white, white, white. Newsreaders, politicians, Supreme Court judges, professional colleagues, are not only white, white, white, white. Growing up in an Australian country town, at the time I did, was a very white, white, white, white experience. One better left in the past.

Not every societal shift over time has been wonderful. We really DID leave our houses and cars unlocked in the country. And we COULD run off and spend the day playing with kids outside on the street, turning up at each others’ houses for dinner, with everyone more or less watching out for everyone elses’ kids.

But, some changes have made the world a very different, and better, place; one that ten year old me could not have imagined.

Walking the 600 metres or so to the yoga studio this morning, I accidentally bought a bicycle.

Living in the inner city is much more like the country town where I grew up than the suburbs were. When I leave my building I see at least one person I know and say hi, or recognise some of the others also bustling about their day. Most of what I need is in walking distance. More than what I need.

The bicycle? I already shipped my faithful Giant across the Nullarbor with me when I moved. I happily used it to travel those extra kilometres that my feet would not take me. Now that its parking spot is my entryway, it was pretty heavy to get up and down in the lift. I sort of vaguely thought it would be nice to buy something not 20 years old with a steel frame.

So – this morning, a few doors down, a roller door that is usually closed was open. A charity that works with kids ”at risk of not being awesome” was holding a bicycle workshop and sale. The kids work on donated bicycles then sell them. I bought something light, white and cheap; and donated the blue Giant. It wasn’t until this evening that I realised that my Bottecchia lite cross is actually a really super-duper bicycle that usually only people who LOVE, really LOVE, bicycles buy.

In this street of around a kilometre, I can choose from five or six places for a morning coffee. I could order a gravestone at one end of the street and have a will drawn up across the road. I could have my bridal dress altered in the shop downstairs, and send my kids to the community school. If it didn’t work out, I could go to the family lawyers across the way. I could have my tyres changed next door to the electronics importers before popping in to the barbers. I could browse the real estate agents and buy a house, use the conveyancer a few doors down, then pray in the Christian Centre. If I was really, really into print I could get the printers to make a batch of flyers, but if I preferred digital, I could always go to the mysteriously windowless data storage and cybersecurity centre on the corner. I could even buy a specialist hockey stick and all the hockey gear I could ever use.

So, given all the opportunity, I guess it is not THAT surprising that I ended up accidentally with a bike!