Posts that are Uncategorized-ish
From an email I wrote recently to a friend, who subsequently asked me to post these passages on my blog so she could share them with others.
I think a lot of the things and behaviours that make an open source community work are also applicable to dating, if that makes any sense at all.
Aspiring to radical realtime transparency but knowing you’ll fall short, having a rhythm, working to become a better hacker and help others become better hackers themselves, even if you’re different types of contributors or working through different processes or on different projects for a while. Clarification, getting things out on the table. The willingness to waste time experimenting because you know it’s not actually wasted time at all, just a process with long-term and unpredictable results.
My boyfriend uses the phrase “beautiful awkwardness” to describe the feeling you get sometimes when you’re sitting in the uncomfortable spot in the relationship domain specifically — but if you’re lucky, there’s someone you’re sitting with, together. And maybe that’s how you can tell. I dunno, I’ve never done this before. But if you’re comfortable enough with someone else that you can be uncomfortable together, then… that means something, I think.
Sunday, January 29th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Today ended up being an input day, a reading day, a lazy trying-things-out day. I want to go outside and walk the town at some point, so I’m clearing house a little so I have that calm, scrapbooking bits I don’t want to forget so I can let go of them in my mind.
Found a lovely poem called “Mastery” by W. H. Auden.
You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation.
You have only to watch his eyes;
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,
wear the same rapt expression, forgetting
themselves in a function.
How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.
Auden also once said this:
Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.
Somehow related in the fragments of my mind: the Technium has some short pieces on wisdom for the digital age, the sorts of things I imagine great-grandchildren of today’s teenagers chuckling over the same way my generation read the “Little House on the Prairie” series with the fascination kids have of a bygone era.
Klaatu showed me ownCloud, and I am enthralled.
Trying to find copies of the International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes to read somewhere.
I started reading c-base materials written in German and can now make out fuzzy outlines of meaning without a dictionary. Yes, I’m working through grammar books and going through translation exercises in reading class where we do pull apart sentence structures with a fine-toothed comb and debate which vocabulary word maps to what phrase. Once in a while though, it’s fun to just read something normal at a normal pace and see how I’ve progressed; what looked like gibberish to me before is now a story painted in broad strokes, with blurs. No details yet, no exactness; I need to learn more words before that. But I’m learning.
Saturday, January 28th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I write again tonight to sort my brain out. Bear with me; it’ll take a little while to get past the facts and through into the thinking and maybe a little of the feeling.
Purdue has a kickass audiology department with a student clinic that does full hearing tests for $10 (if you’re a student). I’m at least 6 years overdue for mine, so I went in and got mine done this week. The people were great. The grad student and the audiologist were both cool, sharp, patient with my questions, appreciative of the detailed answers and feedback (“it’s nice to get someone who knows about this stuff, you’ve done your homework!”) and encouraging of my interest.
The test results were a little bit surprising; my residual hearing is in the low frequencies, and the mid-range of what I’m able to hear has apparently dropped about 30dB in the last decade, which is a nontrivial and unexpected shift. I’d want to remeasure before freaking out, and I’m not freaking out about that drop (so I go from hard of hearing to… hard of hearing? big deal) but I don’t want to lose what I’ve got, and they said it wasn’t normal for hearing to just spontaneously drop in someone so young. But by and large, I’m in the same place I’ve been for the past 2 decades. Cool.
We talked about hearing aids. My hearing loss has always been one of the most difficult to amplify, and this is still the case. I’ve got high-frequency sensorineural, sweeping down through severe and into profound – “profound” is the step right next to “stone deaf.” Sensorineural means it’s the last step in the chain-o-hearing that’s broken, so we can’t bypass anything short of jacking directly into my brain (which is what cochlear implants do).
Things have come a long way, especially in the past 2 years, for people with my sort of loss. Amusingly, some of the things they’ve implemented in hearing aids recently are the same things my friends and I tried in SigSys when we were undergrads. (I can verify that frequency compression sounds terrible.) However, when you get down to it, hearing aids can’t isolate the sounds I can’t hear without bludgeoning the sounds I can hear to death — if we turn up the dial so I can get the high sounds, I’m already clawing at my ears in agony because the subwoofer is too damn loud.
But there’s a bit more. I’d noticed for years that hearing test were done with two types of sounds: pure tones and scrambled buzzing sounds that sound like very far-off beaver sneezes. So I asked why they used beaver sneezes in the hearing test – casually, expecting an answer like “oh, the two types of sounds help us distinguish between X and Y.” Instead:
“Beaver sneezes?”
“Yeah, the noisy ringing buzzer sound, the one that’s not a pure tone that you play…”
“Those are pure tones.”
So this is what the beaver-sneezes mean: my cochlea is crap. It’s rubble so far destroyed that even if hearing aids could isolate and amplify those frequencies to the point where I could hear them – which, by the way, is somewhere around 120dB, or the volume of a jet engine – I would, at best, get scrambled signals. The best I can hope for is the ability to hear beaver sneezes.
Well, shit. There goes my hope of someday working on a thing that’ll let me hear a Mozart flute concerto like a normal musician.
But – moving on! I’d decided to do the Hearing Thing this semester, and when I do something, I want to do it all-out – I want to do it right. So I’ve been taking my first trips to the Disability Resource Center to get set up for CART, to the Vocational Rehabilitation center for the state of Indiana so they can give Purdue money to get me CART, and going to the university’s counseling center (staffed by psychology grad students who are getting their clinical experience hours) because I was confused at how confused I felt about this now that I’m not pushing through everything I don’t understand by blocking it with overwork. Everyone has been very wonderful and kind.
“It sounds like you’ve worked very hard to let yourself appear as normal,” my counselor said at one of our most recent sessions.
“Because I like forgetting,” I replied. And then I stopped and did a double-take at what had just come out of my mouth.
I do. I like forgetting. For someone who advocates awareness at all times… I like forgetting. I like it when my family forgets. I like it when my classmates go “no, really? I couldn’t tell!” I like it when I can go hours – days, sometimes – without thinking about it, all my adjustments so automatic and unconscious that I’m only aware of them when I stop and analyze in retrospect. To me, that feels like success, to do something that’s really hard to do so well that nobody – not even me – notices that it’s happening at all. Bearing this cognitive load all the time and being able to ignore it? To me, that feels like strength.
On the other hand, wearing a weighted vest at all times certainly might make you (muscularly) stronger, but it’s also kinda dumb.
I don’t know why I should be scared of learning about this, but I think I am scared, a little. Finding out more details about my hearing that I didn’t know before, thinking about, okay, do I want to make changes to my life at some point trying to fix that, what’s the cost/benefit analysis here, do I want to do things that will visibly mark me as different, do I want to think about cochlear implants (ooh, geeking out about shiny technology!) or do I want to say screw it, I’ve got other things to do with my time, because that’s what I’ve done with nearly every decision about this that’s been mine to make…
I’ve always mainstreamed and tried to be a “normal” person, and I can pass — but maybe this isn’t as good a situation as I could be in, and there’s no way to find out whether something else is better without trying it, which means an upheaval of equilibrium, a gambling of resources. Now that I’m doing bigger and harder and more awesome things, I’m starting to run into my hearing as a limiting factor. Maybe not a hard blocker, but as something that saps me, slows me down, to a degree I notice now in a way I haven’t before, with my tiny little schools and the text-based world of my career in open source. My world is huge and open right now – I feel unlimited, I can go anywhere without help… but maybe I can’t go some places as easily as I could otherwise. I’m not sure what “otherwise” is.
Sit in the fear, Mel. Sit in the weirdness and the questions and the things that aren’t resolved. Sit in the discomfort, and keep moving, but don’t run away because you’re scared, and don’t forget the other things you have to do.
Why is the balancing so hard?
Friday, January 27th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 9 Comments »
I’ve been reading around the “communities of practice” space for the past few years, and ran across this bit on John’s blog that resonated with me (emphasis mine):
“In 1997 I decided to leave what seemed like a privileged and secure job in the administration at the University of Colorado to seek my fortune in corporate America and later as a solo consultant. I would never have thought of making such an audacious decision without 5 years of involvement in a dialog group that in hindsight was a community of practice about workplace communication and identity. That dialog enlarged the set of conceivable decisions, because the intimacy of the group gave me access to other people’s decision space. Communities thrive and are most relevant around practices that are difficult, for practitioners that make difficult decisions.”
–John David Smith
It’s important, especially when the aspect in yourself you want to nurture is still young and fragile, to have a world where it is safe. A space you don’t need to protect, a space where you trust others to make and keep it safe for far, far longer than you need it. A little world where you can put your energy and focus into watching and coaxing yourself to gently unfold. And enough buffer time on both sides to both relax into the safety of that world in the beginning, and to steel yourself to go back out again after it’s done.
As I write that last bit, I have a mental image of heavily armored fighters trudging into a room, drifting with snow. They unstrap their helmets, their breastplates, pull off their boots, pile all those things on the side until we see the shapes of human beings in light clothing, soft and slim and vulnerable, in lamplight on an empty mat, breathing. And then they stretch, slowly – and dance, silently, with quiet smiles and the occasional gentle open mouth of soundless laughter, swarming and lifting and touching each other, holding. Then, drenched in sweat, they lie stretched out in the floor in the flickering lamplight, chests expanding up and down, up and down, inhaling and exhaling. And then a ritual of reversal. Toweling off, methodically pulling on the boots, the shinguards, gloves, the plating that protects but also restricts. Door opens, howling of the wind, and then it clangs behind.
They are vital, those regular few moments that remind you that you’re not alone.
Saturday, January 21st, 2012 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Via Nina Cary, a great short post on disabled bodies and ableist acceptance that makes me go damn yeah.
Since age 2, I’ve had the type of hearing loss that’s hardest to amplify. I’m also an engineer who sometimes wonders how to amplify it anyway, a geek who occasionally reads up on languages and cognition and tries to intellectually understand what I can’t perceive, and a hacker who enjoys playing with new tools. But for all that, I’ve been incredibly reluctant to have those new tools go on me or inside me; I’m also the 5th grader who stood up to her parents and teachers and refused to continue wear hearing aids, and a musician who never wants a cochlear implant to compromise my playing, even if I’d likely be a great candidate for EAS.
Part of this is the social stigma. Tools that are on you, in you, with you — people can see them. They mark you as different. “Differently abled,” some advocates say… but really, in common parlance, that simply means “broken.” I’m not broken; I happen to be a first-order low-pass filter.
That last sentence is a key glimpse into the second part: I am a hacker, and I want my body, including my hearing, to be my platform to control. Imagine revisiting my signal processing coursework with this! Imagine being able to treat my hearing like a computer peripheral, exploring what I can do once it’s able to bluetooth-sync to other devices — my head would be an absolutely spiffy sensor probe! These are all things that hearing people might find fascinating; these are all things they might find fun, we may someday all go around with hearing augmentation.
But right now, it’s not worth it to be a cyborg. There’s still a social stigma when people see a hearing aid or a cochlear implant; subtly, somehow, you get treated as more stupid than you would have otherwise. The platforms aren’t mature and accessible enough to overcome their social, financial, and opportunity cost (time I spend hacking on my ears is time I could have spent hacking on something else). And some of these are irreversible decisions: in the case of cochlear implants, you only get one shot per ear; whatever electrode you stick in there is the one you’re stuck with for the rest of your life (unless you want to pull it out and become completely and irreversibly deaf).
So it’s not worth it to me to be a cyborg. Yet. That I know of.
However, Purdue has this great department that does hearing and speech research. And they’re doing some interesting things. And I’ve started heading down there and meeting people, asking if they need an articulate guinea pig who also happens to know software and electronics. And they go wait, you’re an engineer? We need those!
We’ll see what happens.
Tuesday, January 17th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Just learned from Mary Bitter that my opensource.com article “Typing at 255 WPM shouldn’t cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system” was doing well, with over 1,300 views the day before it hit Hacker News (update: now with over 7,000 views on the original article, 236 points and 68 comments and still climbing on Hacker News, and on LWN as well). I don’t write many articles for opensource.com, but tend to be proud of the ones I do – they’re longer and probably a bit more thoughtful than the average, and this shows up on view statistics, which has an impact on the things I write about. (This just in from Josh, Plover’s main developer: “The latest release outpaces the other releases by so much that I’m still not convinced it’s not the result of a spider downloading the tarball every hour.”)
I love Plover as a project, and I’m glad they’re getting lots of attention (well-deserved, and particularly important now that they have a feature-complete product!) – but this was very much not something I was consciously designing for. I don’t think about social media propagation or eyeballs or click counts or anything of that sort, and I’m not sure if I should, honestly. Certainly not on this blog; I’ve turned down multiple advertising offers (they seem to increase in frequency each year) because I made a decision many years ago that my personal blog was for me and for an audience of one – my future self. This means I’ve always written what I felt like writing about, when I felt like writing… it’s an outlet, it’s a place of peace and questioning, it’s many things, but it is definitely mine. And that feels good, having something I do only for myself.
I think that my primary vocation these days (graduate student) may have enough writing-for-other-people that I don’t want to add more to that load; if I want to make things for other people, I might want to try another modality first to balance out my production-portfolio: making physical things, like food or book covers or caricatures – or making intangible things that aren’t writing, like music or talks. Still, the thought of freelance writing or blogging (again, not on this blog, but on another) or creating information products as an income stream is fascinating, although I feel a little… uncomfortable thinking about it. I gotta get over this “thinking about money makes me feel all dirty” thing.
I’m squirming a bit, so it’s time to switch topics. It was a fun three-day weekend, spent back in Glenview with my parents; we went to a casino that’s recently opened not far from our house. Not to play, mind you. I know how the math works, and besides with all the blinking lights and beeping noises I don’t think I could last longer than 20 minutes before nausea overcame me. However, they did have an amazing buffet, which was what we were checking out. Ah, Chinese families!
Also, via Kevin Mark, I found my next German language minilearning project: a telenovela. It’s designed for language learners around my level, and it’s subtitled (in German). Let’s see how quickly I can get through this one! Afterwards I’ll probably work through the second grammar book (this one entirely in German) that Sebastian picked out for me in Hannover, and then… we’ll see. As a potential fun-for-later thing, Kevin Cole sent along Duolingo, which I very much want to try once my account gets an invitation.
And now back to Plover. When I got back to my apartment by Purdue, I unpacked a box that’s been waiting for me for a week, and… well, this picture is for Mirabai.
I finally installed and tried out Plover (worked perfectly), and yes, that’s masking tape on my brand-new Sidewinder X4 keyboard. As for what I’ve learned so far… well, uh, I’m struggling to remember the vowels, actually. So the answer there is “not much yet.”
Pressing two keys with one finger on this setup is awkward, but I guess it’s ok for initial learning… and if I get really into this, I do have an office in the same building as the student project laser cutter. My tentative Plover goal is to be able to use Plover for my dissertation research — which for the record is at least two years from now since this is my first year of grad school. I don’t care if that means transcribing interviews or writing the actual paper or whatever, but I’d like to be able to think of Plover as another tool I can just use by then (rather than something new that needs to be learned).
Monday, January 16th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Well, I’m back in Indiana after some amazing winter break time in Barcelona (amazing seafood, Gaudi, and a Filipino dinner), Wunstorf (discovered I’d learned enough German to ask Sebastian’s mom about her awesome food processor), Hannover (bookstore trip and candied almonds), and Valencia (amazing drive, and my rudimentary Spanish goes a long way).
And I am… happy. And relaxed. And wow, it’s different to come to campus and to class and see people I know a little, a campus I’m no longer constantly lost on, it’s… it’s so much easier to be here this semester. Trying to maintain breathing room, trying to keep myself from working all the time… so far, so good. I’ll cut things if I need to. And I’m asking for help; I’m going to request CART this week, I’ve discovered the writing center, I finally went down to talk with the speech and hearing clinic (I’m something like 6 years overdue for screening) and… guilt for using services for their intended purposes is curiously absent now, although this may just be start-of-semester buzz. I hope it stays, though!
What I wanted to write about, just to get out there (this won’t be a well-written post, it’s trying to cram too much information into too little text because I’m also about to fall over from jet lag) is the adventure quests I’ve started going on. One per day. Inspired by the Adventur Programme (via Sumana) with the intent of getting me out of my apartment, into places with people, having and appreciating experiences and life, and basically having something to do other than work, so I wouldn’t throw myself into yet another deep pit of workaholism. I asked Sebastian to set me up with adventure quests and he kindly did so. I have, in turn, been asked to photodocument and blog about them.
My first three quests:
Eat lunch at Pret A Manger in Heathrow airport. I had a London layover on my way from Spain back to the US, and am notoriously (1) cheap and (2) absentminded about food. Therefore, I was asked to promise that I’d get lunch in Heathrow. And because Sebastian is a giant travel geek, he knew the terminal I’d fly into and out of and that both terminals contained a Pret A Manger restaurant. He’s been raving about the place since we ate there in downtown Chicago this summer when we were there for a U2 concert, and thus I was requested to specifically eat there. This is a photo of my (excellent, if overpriced) falafel wrap and carrot soup. Om nom nom!
Order something Sebastian would like at Greyhouse. Greyhouse is a coffee shop on Purdue’s campus and another place we went to over the summer that Sebastian instantly adored and won’t stop talking about (the chocolate gelato and the crepe menu may have something to do with this). I upped the quest level by walking there during the sunrise, which was gorgeous, and I ordered the drink I’m going to try persuading him to get the next time we both go there: a matcha latte. It was fantastic, huge, and slowly sipped while I worked my way through chapter 9 of 12 of my German grammar book (today’s lesson: prepositions and reflexive verbs — we got the book in Hannover less than a week ago and I’m already 3/4 done and fascinated by grammar for the first time).
Climb inside the Purdue Terrestrial Observatory tracking antenna. This was an unexpected bonus quest; unknown to most, Purdue has a pretty ridiculous setup for receiving satellite data. We’re talking a maybe 125 meter high platform atop 4 feet of concrete with a fiberglass sphere containing an antenna with a dish 4 meters in diameter, tucked away from campus at an obscure site surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. This past fall, I’d asked Larry Biehl, who maintains the system for Purdue, if he could take me out the next time he went up there; Larry had warned me that he only goes up every couple of months, and I said it was ok if it took a while.
This afternoon I got an email: “I am just heading out.” I scrambled to my car and was soon hitched to a harness and climbing up and into the dome’s tiny porthole, where Larry graciously walked me through the system and explained all the equipment, answering my constant supply of questions. Fiberglass dome with lightning rods on the outside means the motors can be smaller since they don’t have to be rated for the outdoors (both in terms of weather-resistance and being strong enough to resist 100+mph winds battering a 4m diameter dish). The system tracks maybe 10 satellite passes per day, each one taking somewhere between 8 and 12 minutes. It’s 3-axis, 2 motors per axis to load-balance and reduce wear on the motors. Redundancy everywhere. Flies, too. Sweltering hot in the summer; in 2011, one of the motors hit 60 degrees C and just shut down. What happens if the power’s out? What are those buttons? These are the motor control breakout boards? How did the negotiations go with the city 5 years ago when you were trying to figure how to run the power and data out here? He walked me down to the nearby building where the signal cables run into a large boxy unit that converts the raw data into a more consumable form; I was in geek heaven. Many, many thanks to Larry for an incredible opportunity… I wish my cell phone could take pictures that would do it justice.
Tomorrow’s quest is to try out the yoga studio down the street. I’d better sleep soon to make sure I’ll be awake for class, though – jet lag is calling my name (I got back from Spain the night before my first class started at 9:30am).
Tuesday, January 10th, 2012 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Minimalism of possessions has long been a point of pride for me, perhaps overly so. When I travel (which is often), I live out of my school backpack and/or a small suitcase not much larger, and up until the acquisition of furniture for my grad school apartment this past summer, all I owned fit into my 18-year-old car. In fact, I regularly threw things into that car and moved… and moved, and moved and moved. Between school dormitories and a highly transient working life, the longest I’ve kept a “home” since I was 14 is 11 months, and that was my apartment in Raleigh. And I spent perhaps 20 total days there out of my first 5 months “living” in Raleigh.
It’s been extremely disconcerting to spend most of my time in Indiana. My classmates, I think, see me as traveling a ridiculous amount, especially for a first-semester grad student… but I still feel like a bird with clipped wings, pacing, pacing, pacing back and forth between the walls I’ve actually hung pictures on (but you’ll move so what’s the point of decorating?) and the shelves and fridge and pantry I’ve actually stocked food into (but you’ll move so why get such a giant sack of rice if it’ll go to waste?) and it is profoundly uncomfortable to make myself comfortable, at ease, at home, to sit down and unpack my bags and not be wary of always being able to go at a moment’s notice.
I know that it’s better to build whatever sort of home you can instead of never letting yourself settle in a bit; if you need to get up again and keep running eventually, it’s good to breathe in the little spaces you can have – why would you pass that up? I think it comes from the same sentiment as “it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” — and trust me, I have problems with that too. We lose everyone and everything eventually (if nothing else, we die), and that doesn’t mean nothing is worth having, but… I struggle with this. And I know there is a difference between knowing – the intellectual, I-have-logically-solved-this-with-a-pencil knowing – and knowing. And I know (intellectually) that knowing takes time, and that this time must often be spent sitting in discomfort.
That doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable, though.
Back to the original topic of possession-minimalism, since this is more of a braindump attempt to get my thoughts out there in solid form than anything else… I recently gave myself permission to view work-things as separate from life-things. (Or more accurately, to have a view of life that separates work-things from life-things; there are plenty of other views I have that don’t.) One thing I’ve experimented with is explicitly telling myself that it’s ok to have a lot of books, that I’ll set up a little force field around my bookshelf that protects it (temporarily) from my constant urge to purge things from my life, and see what happens…
Because here is the thing – yes, for some people, purging books is wonderful and cleansing and healing and cathartic and all sorts of stuff, and those books have been gathering dust for sentimental reasons and all that (and I have felt good shedding baggage like that too). But right now, I am a fledgling academic. I’m learning to work with books, on books, books books books… and up until I said “Stop! Temporary suspension of minimalist tendencies on bookshelf!” I was artificially impoverishing my world. I’ve done the minimalist bookshelf thing, and likely will again someday… but right now, I’m exploring new terrain and it’s okay to allow myself to play with tools and take a chance on them. The books I’m getting are all deliberate, purchased to add a specific thing (even if that specific thing is “randomness and inspiration”) to a specific project, and I read them – actually, devour them – shortly after they arrive at my door. They’re not “someday” books, they’re not sitting unused. They are actively bringing insights and joy and growth into my life. That’s great! That’s okay! I can buy books! It’s okay!
At some point, some of these books will probably not be adding anything to my life. At some point after that, I’ll discover that they aren’t. And then at some point after that, I can pass them on to a better home. I don’t need to freak out about making sure I discover that right away – I mean, it’s not like books that aren’t useful to you explode and set your house on fire if you don’t catch them within a week.
There’s an interesting relationship between how much you worry about later and how much you’re able to deal with now. Everything eventually becomes a “now” for you – you can only deal with stuff in your present. So if you’re confident that you can handle anything that happens to you in any sort of future-now that might come up, you don’t worry about later, because “later” is just a future-now.
Sometimes I find that space; sometimes I find it in parts of my life, sometimes it feels like I have it in the whole. It comes, goes, shifts around. I’m not sure how to find that space consistently when I need it; I’m not sure how to stay there once I’m in, but I have noticed that worrying about staying in is one of the quickest ways to fall out. I’m trying to get myself to stay and watch, but watching’s hard; it’s sitting in that itching, tickling discomfort. But I think it’s the discomfort of something that’s stretching, budding, growing. (Or it could just be complacency. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.)
If I had to pick the biggest thing I learned in 2011, it would be “how to not run away.” What do you do instead, though?
Thursday, December 29th, 2011 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Most of my recent posts have been reflective ones; it’s interesting to note that, and to wonder when they’ll swing in a different direction.
Sometimes it’s strange to look back and realize how much your thinking’s changed in one semester. It’s not a full-blown mind-flip like I’ve had in the past, but given that grad school wasn’t exactly my all-consuming full-time gig this term and that a constant worry was that I was shortchanging myself and “not absorbing anything,” it’s… nice to know I learned a lot. A few recent events pointed this out to me.
The first was when a conversation about ABET accreditation (which certifies colleges as “real engineering schools”) came up on an Olin mailing list. My first thought: “This discussion should be grounded in the knowledge of the accreditation criteria and process at least a little.” (I directly blame my professors Senay Purzer, Ruth Streveler, Alice Pawley, and Brent Jesiek for infecting my brain with the “this should be grounded” meme.) And so I typed up a quick-n’-dirty guide to ABET background which I’ll post here in a moment.
The second was when David Wiley advertised that he and a new grad student were “currently looking for research exploring the motivational and / or learning outcome impacts that occur when student work is made public.” I sat down and wrote out a long braindump in reply (short version: major dearth of empirical work, let’s fix this).
Then there was the FIE 2012 call for papers, wherein during a conversation with Sebastian about what we should be submitting, I realized that academic venues didn’t seem… so unfamiliar to me now. As I told Matt earlier this month while we were sitting around his mother-in-law’s kitchen table late at night, it feels like I’m starting to see the way the fabric of this world is put together. I’m not saying I’m good at this. I’m not. I know I’m a stumbling novice. But I can see, most of the time, where I might be blind, and know where and how to ask for help in it; more and more now I can see the mistakes I’ve made — and sometimes the ones I’m about to make, so I can correct myself before I make them…
I’ve been in this state before with every project, every community, I’ve ever learned to shape as a whole system; Olin, OLPC, Fedora, others… I’m starting to get the same subtle shimmering sensation that tells me that someday – not now, maybe not even soon, but someday – this world will be my world, and I will be able to shape it, bring others into it, and bridge it into other universes. And I say “my world” not in the sense of possession or control that excludes others, but in the sense of fluid and empowered citizenship.
Friday, December 23rd, 2011 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Spring class schedules have been determined! My academic plate for the upcoming term:
- Pedagogy, Content, and Assessment (“how to design a good class”), for which I may use the POSSE curriculum as my term project.
- Theories of Development and Engineering Thinking (“how engineers think and how people learn to think”), the class most likely to make my head hurt with unfamiliarity next semester.
- German for Reading Knowledge II (“how to use a dictionary to read a book in German even if you don’t speak the language”) which I’m using as “language-learning for the mostly-deaf” to the great amusement of the German department.
- Art and Design Research Methods (“putting rigor into creative stuff”) with Shannon McMullen of Electronic and Time-Based Art, who also taught my art class this semester. Awesome. And I won’t be the only Engineering Education student this time – Canek is joining me!
- An independent study that’s basically implementing an Open Access policy at Olin College, my undergraduate alma mater – which means I get to learn about open licensing and copyright and work closely with both Purdue and Olin librarians during the spring term… yay for quality time with Amy and Dee!
- Transcript analysis of “change agents” with my research group, which will be my first introduction to formal academic research. Ah, cognitive apprenticeship, how I love thee.
Of course, that’s my academic plate. (It used to be heavier. Then multiple people gasped in horror and talked me out of taking 7 classes at once.) And then there’s the nonacademic plate…
Crawling through the end of the semester. Trying not to be a hermit. I think I really just need to get up steam for that last big final push – two more deliverables to go, and then… I’m getting in my car and heading west.
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
