Week 9 Thing 2 (Habits of the Highly. . .)

Was there any requirement that we do these 23 Things in order? I was reluctant to talk about Thing #2 so I skipped to Thing #3. Now in week 9 I’m returning to explore my relationship to lifelong learning.

These 7 1/2 habits of lifelong learners are attitudes I use automatically in my life, all except #6; 'Use Technology to your Advantage.'

Just this week my business website Alesia Art Glass went live. Since this is my 30 th year as a professional glass artist, no one would suggest that I’ve been speedy to warm up to the opportunities afforded me by Internet technology. Now I am not only the ‘person across the room’, or ‘the person at the end of a telephone line,’ I am at a ‘spot’ dangling from a ‘juncture’ on a ‘web.’ Does my terminology suggest the sinister? I don’t mean for it to. A web is a wonderful creation.

The truth is that I don't have the kind of mind that can quickly scan a wall of type and elicit the information I want. It seems to me that people who can whip around like attention challenged dervishes and know what does what and where to go for what are all sort of intuiting their path. I sit carefully reading and making notes and asking myself questions like 'what's a browser?' 'what's a URL?' and those words are not in the dictionary. I feel screwed to my chair. My hair is standing on end with tension.

As I struggle with 23 Things I have to keep reminding myself why I wanted to be an Information Librarian in the first place; for exactly the reasons why completing 23 Things is difficult for me. I wanted to expand my natural horizons, to stay relevant to my time in history, to make real to myself what seems so unreal, so obscure. Will new synapses rise to the occasion and join hands? Oh, I hope so.