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Tidying up the office today, and admired this piece acquired through work. The year was 2002, and was also the decline of the “dot com” days. Maybe someday it’ll be worth something, unlike all those stock options that expired worthless. 

One more paper to complete before Winter Break. I've learned a lot this past semester, but it is time for a break.  

I have been going full speed with the doctoral program since May. I am tempted to say that I am burned out...but I am reminded of my high school soccer coach whose favorite reply to that was, "You were never on fire."

Maybe I prefer a slow burn. Back to that last paper, a dispositional reflection. Due Wednesday by midnight. 3-4 pages.

• Connects (a) the core literature from Leading Organizational Change and (b) your experiences within and outside of the course during the last eight weeks, with at least three specific dispositions listed in the Mindset of a Scholar-Researcher (Concordia University–Portland Office of Doctoral Studies, 2018) material.

• The essay should address the following questions:

How has your understanding or practice of the three dispositions changed with the new ethics knowledge and experiences you have developed in the course?
How do you envision these three dispositions applying to your future work as an ethical social scientist?

• Leadership is a team sport.  
  

• Most of us (men more so) tend to be overconfident.

• Memory is more often reconstruction rather than reproduction.

• Our conscious short term memory is confined to 5–7 things at once.

• Multitasking is subject to error.

• We sincerely believe things from the past that are simply not true; we provide explanations of the past or the present that put ourselves in a good light, and others less so.

• After a point, more information makes people less accurate than having less information (the overload problem).

• We don’t like to make mistakes but we dislike even more admitting them.

• Our best lies are ones that we firmly believe to be true.

• Confidence may be negatively related to accuracy and in any case is no predictor that you have something right.
  

• And worst of all, a lot of this occurs in our subconscious brain, so that ‘‘introspection alone will not help our vision, because it will simply confirm our self-justifying beliefs’’ (Tavris & Aronson, 2007, p. 44). 
  

Gather. Build. Protect.

✪ see the Dunning-Kruger Effect and Dunbar's Number

I've spent a lot of time organizing things lately. Organizing my to-do list. Organizing my research. Organizing my time. Organizing my workbench in the printshop (see below).

And, I've read quite a bit about organization strategies these last few weeks, as required for my doctoral program. Some of these books and scholarly articles are written by experts in the field. Organization Development in Schools and Colleges, for example, details strategies and approaches for organizing (or reorganizing) systems for change.  

For all the organization I have done in my personal life, I now have a deeper appreciation for it. There is satisfaction in building something, or restructuring something, and making it better. It becomes efficient, and efficiency is beautiful...efficiency is art. 

The past few days, I've spent some quality time thinking about social bookmarking. 

Here's why: the "required studies" in both of my 8-week summer session classes presented lengthy lists of readings that were often in the form of PDFs and web pages. The next two courses in the Summer Session, that officially start Monday, are no different. One area in which I struggled these past eight weeks was organizing (and annotating) all of this material. 

Because the "scholarly research" and writing process for the courses loops back with frequent regularity, I have decided that I need a simpler system.  Referring back to the BlackBoard LMS only ends in frustration.  The links to these articles in BlackBoard are neatly packed into folders for each week, but the links open a series of tabs > Library > Database > etc.  

Previously, I downloaded the PDFs and saved them to Google Drive folders for ease of reference, but I found the PDF comment/copy feature a little clunky. Simply reading a PDF on a small screen is torture, and annotating is an exercise in futility. Really, what I want is to eliminate the PDF component altogether. And, surprisingly there are practically no "social bookmarking" sites in operation in 2019 although the use of "social media" has been steadily increased for year. I'm not sure what that says about society...that's a commentary for another blog post. I just want a functional markup tool that allows me to stayed organized, and maybe collaborate.  

I have used Pinboard ("Social Bookmarking for Introverts!") for over ten years, and I love it. But, it's not built for markup and lengthy annotation.  I almost forgot that del.icio.us (remember that site?) was purchased by Yahoo! and eventually by Pinboard. And, that made me think of Diigo. Diigo works great for annotating, but I'm still on the fence about paying for the upgrade. After all, it's been about ten years since I've used Diigo extensively. It's a good stop-gap solution for now. At least Diigo allows me to tag, sort, and organize the web pages and PDFs, and it allows me to share them for collaborative assignments.    

But, I worry about file size and storage.  I don't want to pay extra to host a massive list of bloated PDFs. Maybe the answer is to find an open-source solution that would allow me to convert a PDF to Markdown. Smaller file sizes and easily stored within Drive. Maybe I just host my own...