Our neighbors, who recently moved here from Hawaii, are obviously going to be the cool neighbors on the block. No pun intended.
So, I’m moving my “Saturday Evening Posts” to Sundays. The name isn’t as catchy but the timing is better for me.
The list of things I starred this week on Twitter and in my RSS feed was long this week, you guys. I actually had to cull quite a bit, because you all deserve only the best of the best.
Android/iOS: The American Red Cross has already released an app with information on what to do in emergencies for people. The Pet First Aid app fills the same need for any pet-related emergencies you might have.
In addition to providing basic emergency info for things like bite wounds, poison, or choking, it also allows you to store a variety of helpful information about each of your pets. You can add your veterinarian’s contact info as well as entries for each pet’s name, age, tag IDs, medication info and more. While hopefully you won’t need to use the app very often, if you have pets it may be worth keeping it on your phone.
- Integrate the Pantone Color of the Year, Radiant Orchid, into… , Stash Tea Blog
Integrate the Pantone Color of the Year, Radiant Orchid, into your tea cupboard this year! Its bold hue intrigues the eye and sparks the imagination! Cheers!
I don’t usually include the images from the posts, but this is so pretty! I kind of want to do my office in this hue now.
- Why Law Schools Need to Incorporate More Online Technologies into Teaching, Best Practices for Legal Education
Few in the legal academy are looking into how we can use technology to reconceptualize our own overall approach to teaching. If we embrace online technologies now, we will begin to develop expertise within the legal academy about how to best use newer technologies for legal education.
- Being Negative is Safe, Pegasus Librarian
It struck me recently that those people who fixate on the flaws in every plan are in safe territory all the time. There are no perfect plans. There are no perfect interfaces. So these people will be right every single time — there are ALWAYS flaws. But you can’t actually live like that …
- GymPact, The App That Pays You For Working Out, Relaunches As Pact With New Diet Features, TechCrunch
GymPact, the app that makes you pay–literally–if you don’t meet your exercise goals, has a new name, Pact, and two new diet-oriented features for the New Year.
Wait, wait, wait – I was all excited for a minute. Does it pay you for working out, or does it make you pay if you don’t reach your goals? Because one of these things is much more inciting than the other.
- Here Be Dragons, SarahGlassmeyer(dot)com
So here we are in our own Age of Discovery, although perhaps “Age of Disruption” or “Age of Disintermediation” or even “Age of Innovation” would be a better term. In law, libraries and higher education, we know there are new areas soon to be available to us but no one knows exactly what form they will take. The best guesses are roughly in the shape of dragons, sea monsters and giants.
…As anyone liberally educated knows, the Age of Discovery is a bit of a misnomer. It’s hard to describe arriving at a piece of land as a “discovery” when there are already hundreds of thousands of indigenous people with fully formed cultures and societies already living there and that have been for thousands of years. One of the best path towards the future is going to be by learning from other professions that have gone through their own disruptive periods.
Speaking of, I’ve also started to really dislike the words “innovation” and “disruption” lately. We honor “innovators” and the highest honor one we can give to a company or service is to call it “disruptive.” The impression is that only the most special of special snowflakes are capable of invoking change and that we only need to change when the environment demands it.
Seriously, people. Stop quoting Susskind. Stop comparing your online education efforts to Coursera. You will never be Amazon.com .
The truth is that professions and organizations (and organisms) are always changing and evolving. You don’t need to wait until the bottom drops out or some other major cataclysmic event occurs before you decide to change. Dinosaur were wiped out by a giant meteor, true, but there were several thousands of changes that happened before and after that event and not all as a result of something bad. Find your strength and capitalize on it instead of waiting for things to stop working.
I will probably never not link to Sarah Glassmeyer’s blog. She always has something interesting to say about things close to my heart. Being an academic law librarian right now is to be a part of three institutions that are currently undergoing tumultuous change, and it’s hard not to constantly be reacting to stuff, rather than consciously trying to be proactive in seriously considering the best way to do one’s job – or to improve it.
I’ve also been participating this week in WordPress’s “Zero to Hero” better-your-blog thingy, but much of that involves behind-the-scenes stuff (following others’ blogs, thinking long and hard about your blog’s name (nope, not changin’ it), etc.), so I don’t have much to report on that front. Just wanted to explain the badge that I stuck up there on the top right. If my blog suddenly gains massive amounts of followers, or is linked to on a listicle or something, you’ll know why.
‘Til next week!
jkbeitz 