Reflections on Tumbler & Google Reader

[Julie Miele]

I am so uncomfortable right now.
This is the anxiety that motivated me to take this class in the first place.
It's very strong and ugly right now, and I'm feeling extremely anxious and frustrated.

Perhaps I'm just on information overload, but there is just so much information out there in the world. I think it's really difficult because when navigating these on-line sources, you really have to be skilled at several things simultaneously. First, you need the time, the interest, and the intelligence to read through all of the information that you're looking at. Then you need to sort inside your your head, deciding what works, what doesn't. You also are running a whole bunch of new questions in your head: what else do I want or need? What should I explore next? And finally, there's the technological know-how of knowing how to do the searches, send the information to Tumblr, establish all the setting, the RSSs.

Which is where I get really, really stuck. I'm not sure when this happened in my life, as I was always a pretty fast and independent learner, but I really had trouble following today's lessons and instructions. I think this is one of the things that makes teaching technology really difficult. If I missed one word or one instruction that came out of Paul's mouth, I was totally behind - because the group had literally jumped to another page or site and the steps become hard to trace. I had to keep asking Beth and Wendy to backtrack and explain things to me (Thank you ladies, and I apologize. I know it's annoying - I'm normally not that girl.).

Which is not to say that I'm not finding value in today's tools. I absolutely do, and I find it really interesting and exciting. But the navigating is really difficult. Can we maybe slow things down a bit?

Google Reader was interesting and fun. Although I found that once I got on and starting searching, I became so involved that I didn't really make it back to exploring Reader itself or back to Tumblr. In the end, it felt more like just doing a Google search. I know it's different, but I've momentarily lost sight of how and why. I'll keep experimenting tonight.

[Julie]

Oh YEAH. I'm reading every single blog post from this a.m. and this p.m., and honey, you are not alone. So try for the leap of faith, and keep slogging through, knowing that there are things you'll use soon, things you'll set aside and use later, and things you may not use at all -- but it's all to the good.

[Margaret F]

Julie,
I definitely felt that way--pant pant pant, trying to catch up--and hearing everyone's similar questions I turned to Julie C and commented how comforting it was that several others were asking my same "wha???" questions and helping each other out. Regarding the "so much information out there," I advise my TNS students to select and immerse themselves in one research resource at a time, and let it tell them where to look next, instead of "piling up research resources." I quote Barbara Tuchman, "research is endlessly seductive; writing is hard work" ("In Search of History" Practicing History New York: Knopf, 1981: 21). So I wonder now if I'm a dinosaur or if there's still something useful in my advice to slow down and examine less, not more--and of course, like everyone, students will often still start with wikipedia and download or bookmark or add to their tumblr pages gazillions of resources despite my advice. But I do believe less is more. What to do?