Status Updates on Various Fronts

It has been an eventful month! I want to share here some of the things going on, but due to the quantity I will need to do so in short bursts of photos and text.

Bookie looking contemplatively out of our living room
window. Yes she's wearing three headbands.

***

The Metaliteracy MOOC ended in December. Unfortunately, due to the rigorous nature of applying for promotion during the month of October, I fell behind in the MOOC talks and was unable to catch back up. I do have links to all the content, though, and in particular would like to engage with Sue Thomas' Technobiophilia material sometime in the future. Metaliteracy is definitely still my thing, and I learned most from the MOOC by getting to put it into practice and watch others do the same. And it still promises to be a big part of the revised ACRL Information Literacy Standards, due to be completed this summer. So, this MOOC was definitely time well spent.

And, it resulted in this gem appearing in the #metaliteracy Twitter stream a few weeks into the course:

@bazillionpoints hey! how could we not? you guys do amazing work! required #reading for anyone into #metal #metaliteracy \m/ \m/
— Banger Films Inc. (@BangerFilmsInc) September 18, 2013

Nothing quite like scanning and absorbing 140-character soundbytes on a complex educational framework like metaliteracy, only to stumble upon one instance of a lone user creating anew the hashtag #metaliteracy which, in context, refers to the music genre of heavy metal, and even includes the requisite sign of the horns emoticon to be legit. Loved this. Decentralized vocabularies ftw :)

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In December, I officially graduted with my Master of Arts in Theology. In the first weeks of January, the degree was finally in my possession.

#fiveyearsofmylife #worthit

Very exciting, that.

***

Also in the first weeks of January I had my meeting before the Board on Rank and Tenure. This board consists of eleven of my senior colleagues here at my institution, who have been reviewing for the past 1.5 months my massive application for promotion to the rank of Associate Professor. Our Provost was also present at the meeting. The purpose of the meeting was for the board to ask me questions of clarification about my application, consisting of evidence related to my librarianship, scholarship, and service. At the end of the meeting, after I left, the board voted on whether or not to recommend to the university president that I be promoted -- after I left the room, of course. I find out the result of this vote, as well as the president's decision, later this spring.

Here is what I looked like a few minutes before driving to campus the day of my meeting.

All gussied up (to the extent that I gussy up)
#goodimpression #zen #calmcoolcollected 

The meeting went very well as far as I can tell! (Thank God!) I was certainly nervous, but not so to the point where I was spewing verbal red flags in my responses. The tone in the room was serious but collegial. I was asked questions by four of the board members, and I was in the room for around twelve minutes.

Anyone reading, who is of the praying kind, I'd be grateful for prayers that my application is a successful one...promotion would mean a lot of things for me, both personally and professionally. This was arguably one of the most important meetings of my career thus far. I will assuredly post here with the results of the process.

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Bookie is very much the toddler these days! This week she began in the next room up at day care, which has more structure and opportunities to develop now that she is running all over the place and pre-talking up a storm. And she did great on her first day in the new room! I'm so proud of her. Here are a few Bookie photos of Bookie being her Bookie-self, with one of me and Paul at Christmastime thrown in for good measure.

Christmas at our parish
Christ is born! Touch ALL the ornaments!

#daddydaughter #myloves

Tea time, thanks to a beautiful gift from
her Aunt T (aka my research
partna' and friend, Teresa) :)

#choirloftpixie at church
on a Sunday morning

#choirloftZEBRApixie at the
sippy cup waterhole

Conducting AND singing along
with Maria Callas #operagirl

Me and my darling :) 

***

And finally, there's this...

#throughglass, but not, because I took this w/ my ol'
 fashioned smartphone -- BUT STILL.

...about which I have many words. I am going to tell the story of this crazy awesomeness in another post, though, as the number of words in this post has reached quota.