Ravelry!

How did they know I was going to try to organize my crafty projects this weekend? I got my invite to join the Ravelry community, and I’m a-rarin’ to go. I don’t have a large stash, nor many projects on needles, but I would like to keep track of them in some way other than scraps of paper tossed along with needles and yarn into the baskets.

They’re in the process of moving it from beta to the “grown up” servers and whatnot. I’m glad I wasn’t invited earlier, because I don’t think I would have had the time nor the focus to help beta test as all the others have. It’s a really neat idea, and I hope it keeps up its momentum and turns out to be super wonderful. It’s had a huge response so far and the waiting list has been months in the making. I put my name down sometime during the first week of June, I think, and I got my invite this morning. One of the many cool things about Ravelry is that it’s for crocheters and knitters alike. It’s for yarny people in general and is trying to bridge the rift between the two crafts.

I’ve got to take care of a few things that have been on my to do list for ages, and then it’s off to Ravelry land for me. I’m going to The Knitting Librarian‘s going away party this evening, and staying at the Spinstah‘s, and then there’s the Creative Sugar meeting tomorrow, but I’ll have to find some crafty time in the middle of all that. Should be a fun weekend!

In other crafty news

Peeking inside the lappy cozy

I made a laptop cozy yesterday. I figured that if I’m to bring my computer to school with me (which was the purpose of having one in the first place) then I’ll need to be able to transport it safely. That doesn’t mean the cozy has to be boring, oh no indeed.

Here we have red bandana-style, orange, and orange ladybug print fabrics. Exciting! The red print is a bit canvas-like, and twill, so it’s got some ruggedness, too. I used 3/4 inch foam to keep the lappy safe, though I trimmed it a bit short, so the top of the lappy kind of sticks out a bit from it’s foam protective envelope. There is a big flap that folds over, so it’s not totally unprotected.

This is another example of a crafty project that I sort of planned while I was making it. I didn’t even change the thread in the sewing machine. I couldn’t find my red, so I used the yellow that was already in there. I’ll call it “accent stitching.” It didn’t take me long to make… maybe 30 mintues? Something like that.

Click on the photo to be taken to flickr, where you can find a different view of it.

No comment

I keep getting comment spam (200 per day), but I can’t seem to do a blanket change on past posts to make them closed to further comments. I can make it so that all future posts are closed to commenting, but it seems I have to change each past one individually. I don’t have that kind of time, really. It’s just getting so annoying having to sift through each batch of comments to find the two that are actually my friends, and not someone trying to sell me penis pills.

I also keep getting hundreds of bounceback emails each day, which means that my address has been captured and is being used for spamming purposes. This is really annoying. 

If anyone has any advice, could you please email me? I’d appreciate it. And I’m not getting rid of my address. Why should I change my name, when they’re the ones who suck?

Grr.

Melty brains and techy librarians

I just had my Technology for Information Professionals “midterm” exam. It was postponed three weeks because we hadn’t yet covered all the material that was to be included. We had 105-110 questions on the study guide (depending how you broke them up) and 25 were on the exam, which was worth 60% of our grade. I didn’t buckle under the pressure, thank goodness, but my brain has officially melted and it’s oozing all over the computer lab as I type this.

I present the following as a draft to my course evaluation, which will be made public through our course evaluation process at the end of the semester. Well, maybe not a draft, but certainly a rambly rant about what I think needs to change in order to make the course more effective.

The purpose of this technology course is to address the disparate technological aptitutes among the students in the GSLIS program. We all come from various technological backgrounds, and the course is designed to bridge those differences and allow us, as future librarians, to communicate with a strong technology vocabulary. After all, patrons will go to the nearest librarian on duty when the public access computer they’re using decides to explode. Librarians need to feel comfortable working in a technology-based environment.

Sounds good, right? It hasn’t been as effective at achieving those goals as it could have been.

I have enjoyed the content of the course, and have learned much regarding computing technology, and a little about how libraries use technology, etc., but the assessment process has left much to be desired. First, we were given a study guide in the beginning of the semester that was essentially a big, jumbled mess of questions that didn’t seem to relate to each other in any sort of categorical sense. I’m a library student. Give me categories, please. I wasn’t able to make much sense of the question list until one week before the exam. Prior to that, I had tried to answer the questions as we covered material in the lectures. I found that to be quite difficult, because I had to simultaneously sift through hundreds of slides from the Powerpoint file, while trying to pick out the relevant questions in the study guide. It was overwhelmingly frustrating, and each time I sat down to study, I became more and more confused.

If, however, we had been quizzed after each unit, and if the study guide were broken down thematically, then studying would have been a breeze.If all the networking questions, for example, were set out together, we could have pieced together the details much more effectively and efficiently. I do understand that it was probably the instructor’s intention to jumble everything up so that we had to work hard to find the related concepts among the questions and to figure things out on our own. While that is certainly an acceptable goal, the implementation was frustrating, confusing, and highly inefficient. It wasn’t until right before the exam that the Big Picture of the concepts began to emerge. And then I could finally go back to the very detailed questions and begin piling them together to make some sort of sense.

That method is contrary to all good sense. It’s backwards, really. I’m not against having to work hard to learn the material, but I despise inefficiency. And it’s downright unacceptable for the assessment process in library school to be inefficient. Even if, in my hypothetical model, we had a large final exam to pull it all together, I still think quizzes would have been a great way to help us to prepare for the exam, just to make sure we were understanding the concepts at hand. Not to mention the saftey net it would have provided for our grades.

And I have to mention the sheer size of the instructor’s lecture slides. Hundreds and hundreds of slides per unit, and I think there were maybe five or so units. Not only were they expensive to print, but in order to glean important information from them, you had to use a magnifying glass. Many of the slides were screen caps of web pages with definitions of techy terms. To save space (and money) I printed the slides six to a page, double sided, so that screen cap was teeny tiny, and not so useful to me. Thank goodness I was able to repair my glasses in time.

All in all, I appreciate what this course is trying to do, and I do think it’s necessary for our profession to be, if not tech savvy, then certainly tech literate. I just hate having to waste time and energy on something that could be taught so much more effectively. It’s a problem that other students in different sections are having as well. I should also say that my issues with the course do not have anything whatsoever to do with my opinion of the instructor as a person, or the effectiveness of her lectures. The information that we’re exposed to in class is valuable, and she is able to provide context along the way. So, I suppose this whole blah blah blah is really only about the assessment process.

I want to make note of all these things while they’re fresh, because I want to provide a concise evaluation at the end of the term. I’ll have to come back to these notes when that time comes.

photo editing, anyone?

I need cheap/free photo editing software. Mine was shareware, but I have to register it and I’m not paying 80 smackers for it, and anyway it was way to fancy to run on my crap computer. Advice? We used to have photoshop, but when the old computer died and we created frankencomputer from the random computer parts around the house, we couldn’t find the old disc. So, who wants to help us out? I’ll make you cookies!

Replies: 5 comments… woo hoo!

Werd: Gimp…it’s just like Photoshop, except free. Well not exactly like Photoshop, but very close.

http://www.gimp.org/

Posted by EvillMonkey @ 10/10/2003 08:01 AM EST