Well, this plan of liveblogging the process of preparing for and starting an MLIS program has fallen behind a little, but I’m trying to get back to it. (Not that I haven’t been writing. I’ve been doing a fair bit of writing for coursework, and am gearing up to do a lot more in the next few weeks; I’m blogging more on my main personal page, and working on some independent writing projects!)

I just turned in the last assignment for my first class, and in some ways the hardest, although it should have been one of the easiest, and I did that to myself. That was the theme for the class as a whole: the name of the course, actually, was “Online Learning: Tools and Strategies for Success”, and I came into it with a bit of an attitude; among friends and family, I have been calling it The How To Internet Class, and have pendulum-swung between being over-aggressive and inattentive about it.

The modules on introduction to blogging, and how to manage a WordPress dashboard, and the differences between mailing lists and RSS feeds, and how to use cc: and other email features to interact with working groups, are clearly incredibly valuable… for someone who hasn’t been using email since 1998, or RSS since 2005, or has never maintained a WordPress blog or four.  The parts that I really enjoyed, where I felt engaged, of course, were new things: the specifics of the SJSU library online resources, the Blackboard collaboration platform and the Canvas online education platform itself.

But the assignment that really made me crazy was the plagiarism orientation. I did the assignment early, and fast, and sloppy, because it was very familiar material,  and I resented having to sit through video tutorials rather than reading transcripts or flipping through a slideshow at my own pace; and I thought the assignment itself was badly worded. (“Write a paragraph about what you learned” – and I did. I wrote a paragraph where I said that I learned nothing.) I didn’t just do the plagiarism orientations in undergrad – I spent a semester studying the role of copyleft and alternative intellectual property distribution in activist art and social justice ethnography. So, you know, it was about like being handed a high school freshman Intro to DDC factsheet and being asked to write a paragraph about what I learned.

Of course, it was immediately bumped back for reworking, and I complained about that for a day and a half (the words “I thought grad school was for grownups” may have come out of my mouth) and then back-burnered it .

With the end of the class looming and this one last assignment hanging over my head, I went back and listened to the tutorials again, and then really sat down and thought about what I heard, and thought about context, and thought about under what circumstances some of the more advanced material I was familiar with would be relevant and realized that none of that was relevant to a ground-level academic writing refresher course, and thought about the lesson I’ve learned many times: do it right, do it by the book, until you understand the book well enough to know – not think, not assume, not cut corners – but know when you’re doing something that’s outside the scope of the book.  I thought about “there are no shortcuts” and “we get better at getting better” and “show your work – show it again“. And I sat down and wrote the damn assignment, and felt like I had, at last, slowed down enough to really pay attention, and processed something important that I hadn’t understood before.

So, what did I learn? I learned this: there is always something to learn, always, and even if it’s not the lesson intended, the lesson intended finds its way back home somehow.