Classes
Planning for the Future!
Posted October 17, 2019 by Sarah Callanan
We are now in Week 7 of the Fall 2019 semester! When I was watching my professor’s introductory lecture for this week and she said we were halfway through the semester I almost couldn’t believe it! Then, a couple of days ago, the Spring 2020 course schedule dropped. My goodness this semester is flying by! As the Spring 2020 course schedule just dropped, I’m now intensely studying the course schedule, course descriptions, and trying to figure out what my game plan is for next semester (and beyond). Registration isn’t until November, so I have some time to think about what I want to take, and to strategically plan. I mentioned in my last post one of the things I was hoping to get out of my current class (LIS 401: Foundations of Library and Information Science), was to sort of get an overview and introduction of what’s out there in the LIS world and see what I’m interested in before I dedicated individual classes to topics. This class has been really interesting, and I’ve learned…
Live Session!
Posted October 15, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
I had a live session of my Social Informatics class last week, and I really enjoyed it! There were three sessions available, each on different days and times, and we were required to choose one. I chose the evening session that started at 9pm. This made me a little nervous because I’m usually wrapping my day up at that hour, but I’m pleased to say that I made it through without yawning every two seconds. The worst thing about the meeting was that I looked horrible on the camera (laptop cameras do not do anyone any favors), but I’ll take that over a technical malfunction or brain freeze any day. We didn’t do anything major in the live session. It was more about allowing us all to talk and interact in real time. We started out talking about any questions we had about the course or the assignments, and then talked more about how information is transmitted and used. One of the most important themes of this class is recognizing that there is always someone…
I’m Back!
Posted October 4, 2019 by Sarah Callanan
It’s been a little while since my last post! At the beginning of August (literally less than 12 hours after my summer class ended) I was in the hospital getting major surgery. Unfortunately, the recovery time for this surgery is rather lengthy, and I’ve been staggering my return dates, but now I’m back in the saddle for school, work, and now blog writing! Woo-hoo! Thus far at Simmons I’ve taken all of my core classes (LIS 407: Information Sources and Services, LIS 415: Information Organization, and LIS 488: Technology for Information Professionals), and two of my electives (LIS 451: Academic Libraries and LIS 404: Principles of Management). I mentioned back in April that I had registered for LIS 421: Social Informatics for the Fall 2019 semester. Since then, I ended up switching classes to LIS 401: Foundations of Library and Information Science. This class was recommended to me when I was talking with someone late last year about switching out of archives, and had the two year projected course schedule that SLIS puts out been…
Putting Theory into Practice: Tackling Information Literacy for Incarcerated Students
Posted October 2, 2019 by Katie Carlson
One of the components for my Information Services for Diverse Users class (LIS 410) this semester is a service learning project. I did a lot of community based learning in undergrad, so this was right up my alley! I signed up to work with the Tufts University Prison Initiative of Tisch College (TUPIT), which brights Tufts faculty and students “together with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, corrections staff, educators, and scholars of criminal justice to facilitate creative and collaborative responses to the problems of mass incarceration.” Because I have a background in restorative justice and a vested interest in the rights of the incarcerated, getting to combine these passions with my library studies was a dream come true! This past Friday, I was able to meet with my project supervisor to get a better idea of what our goals are for the semester. As it turns out, we will be creating an annotated bibliography and miniature lit review on the subject of education and information literacy in prisons, as well as the book to prison…
When to Stop
Posted October 1, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
I had a very busy weekend. I finished most of my digital libraries project and I am very happy with it. The only thing I haven’t done is write up my annotated bibliography, but that shouldn’t take too long. I also spent a lot of time on an assignment for my programming course, which I was not expecting. We have a lab and an assignment each week, and they both take time, but nothing like this. I simply could not get my code to work. I spent more than two hours just on the first question. I tried over and over to make it work. I changed my names, variables, punctuation, formulae, and it still didn’t work the way it was supposed to. It was almost there, but not quite, which was even more frustrating. I decided to take a break and try next question, but I could not get that to work all the way, either. So I put the assignment away for the day. When I picked it up the next day, I…
Lots of Reading
Posted September 27, 2019 by Peggy Hogan-Rao
I was very busy this past weekend getting readings done, and my first written assignment for my YA Library Collections class was due on Wednesday. The assignment was to read a Young Adult book. Figuring out what is Young Adult is the hard part. I went to talk to my local children’s librarian at the neighborhood branch of the Boston Public Library, and she showed me her recommendations for good YA books in the collection. Sitting down with the pile of books, it was hard to choose just one. Instead, I chose to read one for the assignment and bring two other books home to read later. Spending all weekend reading Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass by Meg Medina was quite fun, especially when you can lounge in the library’s comfy chair. But after reading that, I realized I have another task to do. When I was in the library this weekend, I saw a teen hanging out in the adult section and the teen section. I asked her to show…
Project Time!
Posted September 24, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
I can’t believe we’re already into the fourth week of classes! I’ve gotten into the rhythm of classwork and due dates (thanks in part to my awesome new planner), and I’ve been balancing everything well. I have two individual projects due in early October and I’ve already started my research for them. The first is a presentation on a digital library for my Digital Libraries course, and the second is a paper on the influence of technology during a specific time period for my Social Informatics course. They are both very interesting, but I wanted to focus on my digital libraries project in this blog. One of the first topics we discussed in class is how digital libraries are difficult to define. Is a digital library literally a collection of digitized objects? Does it need to be limited to books only? Does it need to be organized by time, subject, object, or location? Should it be easy to search through? My classmates and I get to answer some of these questions by each evaluating a…
Moving on to Fall
Posted September 20, 2019 by Peggy Hogan-Rao
This week was fairly uneventful, as all I did was read teen books and sneeze a lot. I really enjoy this program in SLIS! All my assigned readings are really fun, and I never thought homework in grad school would be fun. The only hard part about being slammed with so much homework is I woke up on Monday with the sniffles. The sniffles are really no fun, especially when a sore throat follows a day or two later. Lots of naps this week with the sniffles, but by next week I should be back to Loretta’s for line dancing. For my Young Adult class, I am evaluating trends in publishing. It is so interesting, and makes my course seem so relevant to the profession I will be going into in about a year. The critical texts we read correspond with the assigned young adult books we read, which is really nice. In my other class, I have a lot of textbook readings about story structure. I’ve always loved writing, so I don’t mind…
Intro to Programming
Posted September 18, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
I wrote a post last year explaining all the different ways that discussion happens in online classes (http://blogs.simmons.edu/slis/student-experience/2019/04/participation.html). This semester, I have another new format for my Introduction to Programming course (LIS 485), and it relies on mainly on classmate feedback. Each week, we have to complete a lab and an assignment. The lab is where we practice our coding skills, and the assignment is where we answer questions and/or perform a coding task related to what we’ve learned in the lab. It’s very similar to the format of Technology for Information Professionals (LIS 488), except that now we are required to post our work to the forums for our classmates to review. I was pretty anxious about this at first. In a normal class, if I mess up, I’m the only one who knows besides the professor. With this format, there’s no secrecy. If I struggle or have the wrong answers, everyone will know. What if my classmates judge me for being wrong? Thankfully, this has not been the case. It turns out that…
A Break for Some Fun!
Posted September 12, 2019 by Peggy Hogan-Rao
This week, I tried to have some fun. I was assigned three books to read this week for my YA Library Collections class I spent most of my week studying and reading! The books are: Judy Blume’s Forever; Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly; and Looking for Alaska by John Green. I gave myself a goal on Monday. If I could finish all of the readings for my Writing For Children class, and get halfway done with Looking For Alaska, then I would do something fun on Tuesday night. Howdy, cowgirl! Out I went to a country bar. Walking from Simmons to Fenway, I had never realized how “hopping” the area is. Before heading to Fenway on a Tuesday night, I checked to make sure there was no Red Sox game. The crowds out in Fenway Park can get crazy on game night. With no game, I was good to go line dancing. Growing up listening to country music, I was really excited to learn that there is a country bar in Boston. With…