ramblings

The Power of Serendipity

Yesterday I headed off to the University of Maine at Augusta for a Faculty Development Institute. Basically it was an all day conference focused on a wide range of topics on teaching and collaborating more effectively. I went for a variety of reasons. There were some presentations that touched on the role of libraries in that process, and I was interested in learning more about ChatGPT in education, but most importantly, I went because I never know ahead of time what meeting will end up being helpful or not. All I know is that if I never go to meetings

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The Perils of Groupthink

I’m a regular reader of Reddit. It’s a site with a bunch of communities, and you can pick the communities you want to be a part of. Those communities run from very specialized to very broad. There’s one on Video Games, and then smaller ones for individual video games, or types of video games. By joining one, you get to read a constant stream of updates from that community, collated with all the other communities you’ve joined. There’s a lot to like about Reddit. It’s like an interactive Wiki, with specialists in areas there to offer suggestions and advice on

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How to Be a Jerk Online

Now that I’ve been blogging for so long, having withstood a number of huge technological waves, I have a fair bit of experience with interacting with people online. Often, due to the nature of some of my posts, some of those interactions are less . . . congenial than I would like. Certainly less congenial than I’d treat other people online. But I’ve been taking notes, trying to refine just how to be as big of a boor to random people, in hopes that I might share this with you, my faithful reader. I mean, you could potentially look at

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Handling Rejection

Today in my psychology class, we talked about overcoming anxieties by repeated exposure to those anxieties. One of the specific examples used was the fear of rejection. We talked for a while about how people overcome that fear, and it got me reflecting on what experience I have with it. Looking over the blog, I’ve talked about rejection a lot. I’ve written about getting rejected by schools, by girls, by libraries, by publishers, and by readers. (It was interesting to go back and read some of the posts I’d written way back when–before I’d had much experience blogging–about getting rejected

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Don’t Self-Diagnose

Yes, I’m still in my psychology class, and I’m still thoroughly enjoying it. Today we made it to the DSM-5, the “bible” of psychological disorders. And as part of the introduction, we had a discussion on self-diagnosis. To me, this has always been a pretty cut and dried topic: I don’t know nearly as much as psychological professionals do, so why would I think I’d be able to read over some symptoms and decide whether I had some disorder or not? Interestingly, not all of the students felt the same way, and as I thought about it, I realized that

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