Research Journal Entry #15

I spent the whole glorious day on the beautiful beach yesterday, from 9am to 7pm, drinking rum and napping in the sun and dancing and eating scallops (in no particular order). I started on a new book today, Maine, which is J. Courtney Sullivan’s sophomore novel and so far I like it. She has a very comforting writing style, and she makes the everyday gripping (but not in a creepy Hitchcock way). Sometime tonight and/or tomorrow afternoon, I’ll be submitting my proposal, literature review, web 2.0 service project along with its implementation plan/reflection piece, perhaps the 4th research journal if I can think of something else to say sooner rather than later, and the technical services report for Cataloging…maybe. When I’m not doing that tonight, I will hopefully be watching the Bachelorette and eating ice cream. I can’t even deal with packing for Greece until at least Thursday afternoon, and then Harry Potter is Thursday night/Friday morning! The end.

Research Journal Entry #12

Happy holiday weekend, everyone! As predicted (nay, promised), I have not done any homework since Friday morning (except attached/submitted a copy of my Annotated Bibliography for Research and Evaluation, but I barely broke a sweat) and I could not be happier. The foam party was awesome on Friday, I made some excellent progress on my tan on Saturday, went shopping, ate delicious food, went to Paddy’s again on Saturday night, woke up bright and early this morning and headed to the beach again (although it was mostly cloudy, boo), and now I’m waiting to find out if my friend Hannah has to go in to work tonight or if we can go see Transformers and maybe go to the second foam party (though I’m doubtful that we actually will, and that’s okay with me). Very lovely weekend for me, I hope you’re all enjoying yours as well.

Naturally, this journal entry would be way better had I actually done any work at all since I last posted, but seeing as it’s due on Tuesday and I will not even be starting to think about working on anything until Tuesday afternoon, I figured I’d just get it in now.

So, points off for content but points on for fun??

I mean, honestly, if I wasn’t so gosh-darned good at time and task management, then I wouldn’t have been in a position to be able to shirk my responsibilities this weekend entirely, right, and then I would have had something to update about because I would have been stuck at home working on stuff. But I’m too amazing and efficient for that.

The end!

Research Journal Entry #2

I don’t have anything too crazy to report yet, besides the fact that I am experiencing information overload and subequent anxiety by researching the topic of information overload and information anxiety, which is a little like ten thousand spoons, when all you need is a knife.

The stack of papers I’ve already printed out is about an inch thick, and made up of about 15 articles, varying in length and helpfulness and relevance and readability greatly. I’ve gotten through the first 4 easily, the next 2 somewhat less easily, and the rest remain to be seen.

In all seriousness, it is extremely difficult to find information on information overload without becoming overloaded and straying from what I actually want to learn about it – so far, I have a lot of articles on ways to resolve overload through new technology, because those are the ones that made themselves most readily available, and as a product of the 21st Century Google Universe, those are the ones I printed. I’m totally guilty of or victim to almost everything I’ve read about so far. It’s frightening and frustrating.

Once I’ve gone through all of the articles, I’ll probably do what I usually do – extract the quotes and statistics I’ve highlighted and put them in a Word document, then rearrange them into categories. I also plan on creating a list of synonyms, because everyone has some new way of saying “I’m overwhelmed by technology!” Technophobia, information fatigue, yada yada yada. But that’s next week’s challenge, so I’ll just think about that tomorrow (meaning Tuesday).

I’m going to be that girl who brings research articles to the beach tomorrow morning (8:30am, what what – gotta beat the crowds and get a good spot, duh) during Memorial Day Weekend. Also, my companion for tomorrow is none other than my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. So that should be interesting. I’m packing mini bottles of wine.