Quitting (again!)

I'm not sure why I haven't written about this earlier, I guess in a way it's that I've not been clear in my head why, despite the fact that I'm 110% sure I've made the correct decision.

I've quit the masters, which basically means that I'm not doing the dissertation part of the course.

With all the mucking about from the department (although I have to say, not from my supervisor who was great), and with EH; I totally lost interest and motivation.  But also I came to realise that I wasn't interested in doing something that had no meaning.

In order to get good marks I had to write about research methodologies and concepts, and I just wasn't interested.  I don't need the qualification, or at least not the MSc, and with a the work I've already done I'll still get a Postgrad Diploma.

I never intended to try and get a job in a library, and I have had to face up to the realisation that I'm not an academic.  Coming home one day in tears (and not at PMT time) and being so unhappy I realised that I just didn't need to do the dissertation.

So I've got the summer off!!  Hopefully I've got a job sorted for the beginning of September, but until then I'm enjoying my freedom - I've very poor (studying or not, I'd run out of money), but I'm free to do as I wish for a while.

Not happy

Not a happy bunny, I've not got all my module marks back, and if it wasn't for one thing I'd be in line for a distinction, I've consistently got 1st marks......

But that one thing is that I failed a module - database design.

I knew I wouldn't do well; I'd found the work very hard and not understood a large proportion of it, but I honestly thought I'd done enough to scrape a pass.

Seems not - 44 is not enough (I needed a 50).

If I want to pass the masters I have to resubmit the work and pass - but I've missed out on a distinction because of it (still in line for a merit).

The annoying thing is that I really did try, but they'd not taught the section enough and I didn't understand and could find no-one to help me (I did get some assistance from the lecturer, but I just didn't 'get it') .

Lacking enthusiasm

I started talking to the organisation in January about using some photos they hold. Everyone on my course thought I was being super keen and way ahead of myself - I knew I wasn't.

I went for a meeting, and after explaining my needs I was told it would be fine.

I just needed to identify an area, give a central grid reference and a radius, and they would order up the photos and scan them for me (I wasn't to scan them myself).

So after much waiting for them to get back to me, I finally got an email to say sorry, they actually needed the grid references of the corners of the study area - a month after I'd sent in the original grid references - it was now the end of May and I was worrying about time.

Second week of June I got the list - 3000 photos but with no info other than grid reference of the centre of the image, the height from which it was taken, quality (rating A to C, but with no further info), year and originating organisation.

I spent 3 full days whittling my selection down to 180 photos (they'd told me I could have no more than 200), I sent back the list.

They'd said it would take about 10 days to get the photos, and then a week or so to scan them (and this was a favour as I knew someone there!).

Then I got another email, one that has made me question continuing. It had been decided that due to complications with copyright I couldn't use 95% of the photos I'd been give in the list.

Why did they send me the list if the were going to make that decision? They've always known what I intended to do with them, I wasted 3 days going through a list that was of no use to me anyway!

I've totally lost interest, I couldn't give a shit anymore, and now don't think I'll have enough photos, and to top it off I don't think the system I was planning to use will work.

So it begins

I have three months to write 15,000 words - easy!

But I honestly don't know where to start.

I guess the literature review is as good place as any, so today I've been searching online for papers about citizen science and crowd sourcing.

My dissertation is to be trying to establish if non- specialists can identify archaeological features in aerial photos, using crowd sourcing to recruit the non-specialists.

My problem at the moment is that I don't have any air photos! I've been in discussion with English Heritage since January!

I have a meeting tomorrow with my supervisor and hopefully I'll be clearer afterwards, although I doubt it.

Just good enough

When I was a undergrad I worked bloody hard, essays were written well before the deadline and I really did revise for exams. I was a straight first class student.

Ten years later and I started the Masters with the same ambitions, my first few marks were in the low 70s (1st) and things were on track for a distinction.

Then CBF marked one of my essays, criticised it heavily, and in my opinion unjustly (she didn't appear to have understood the assignment we'd been set and therefore marked everyone down), I got a low mark. But also just at a time when my confidence was down.

It was the beginning of the decline, I got writers block and actually got behind with stuff. Then I panicked. I managed to complete all that needed doing, but the quality of my work really went down.

I'm now getting marks in the mid 60s, and even a 53! And I am trying, but if I'm honest my hearts not really in it anymore.

During this time I also applied for a job that I was superbly qualified for (met every single essential criteria, and all but one desirable), I didn't even get an interview. It freaked me out a little, if I can't even get an interview for a job which the specification could have been written with me in mind, how will I fair in September, when I have to get a job?

I just want the masters finished now. I have two report deadlines to meet, and then my dissertation to complete by September 3rd. It's going to take a lot to keep me motivated!

It's been a while

I don't know how long it is since I blogged, but it sure is too long!!  The main reason I'm doing so now is that I've just completed my sixth Oracle SQL view and since I won't be doing anymore (hand in tomorrow), Jen suggested that I blogged.

So, here it is a blog entry!  It won't say much - despite the fact that I have lots to say.

What have I been upto? mainly getting very stressed about Oracle SQL databases - to the point where I was sitting in our course leaders office sobbing and banging my head on his table - he took it rather well!

As well as the database I've also had to write a 2500 word dissertation proposal (which included a 500 word literature review - 500 words is not enough!!), a 500 word critique of another dissertation (which of course I first had to read), and a 1500 word Content Management Systems Specification.

All are completed and the deadline is tomorrow - so I can go away for the weekend with John (for my birthday) feeling good.

The last deadline for my degree course (not including my disseration) is June 1st - when I have to submit a 1500 word report comparing two methods of creating 'paths' through cultural heritage web resources, a fully functioning CMS built in Wordpress (I'm going to enjoy that bit), and 1500 words comparing Wordpress to Drupal, Joomla and Polopoly CMS.

Of course in between then and now I also have to get through my 40th birthday - but that's another matter!!

For now I'm going to bask in the joy of three more deadlines out of the way and one more step closer to having the letters MSc after my name!

(Jen says that I have to write about how I feel - which is happy at finishing the coursework and getting it done before the deadline.  Actually I feel tired, but I'm looking forward to the weekend as John is taking me to Salt's Mill, then for a very nice meal in a posh restaurant, then on Sunday we are going to Studley Royal and Fountains Abbey for the day - no thinking about uni work for a whole 2 days!).

Struggling

I'm not sure why but I've really REALLY been struggling with my latest assignment - and essay on archives.

The question is How 'inevitable' and 'unavoidable' are the restrictions on access? (with the two words taken from a paper in a book about archives.

First off, the paper in question is terrible - worse than terrible! I can't believe it was published.  The author wanders around not really talking about anything in particular and certainly not about access to archives (which I think was supposed to be the focus).  So that was unusable.

So I went searching for reading - have you ever tried to put the words 'access' and 'archives' into a library search (or even Google Scholar)?  Don't! you won't get anything of any worth.

Lateral thinking was necessary for a start on this one - more searching the library databases and I wasn't finding anything worth using (either not relevant (eg. mainly about internet archiving) or so old that I didn't feel comfortable using them).  I checked the reading list from the course - not much there.

The lecturer is lovely, and very approachable, so I emailed and asked her advice.  I got the following reply:-

"Have you tried searching the library for 'archives' and 'access'?"

So, that was useful advice!  I continued searching and reading.

But I found I was really struggling to find stuff - so I emailed again, this time saying that I was worried that what I was finding was either just about improving access by putting stuff online, or was written about museums and libraries (eg. not archives which are different), or was over 6 years old.

This time I got a longer reply, saying that old material is fine, and that she'd done a search for me; she'd been kind enough to copy and past the search results for me - but she obviously hadn't looked at the results as most were over 10 years old and were not at all relevant.

Unlike me, it's now a week before the deadline and I've still not written the bloody thing - I'm getting there, but it's taken it's time and I hate what I've written!  

R - E - S - P - E - C - T

I'm so fed with being treated like a child, or an assumption being made that I have three brain cells - a number of the lecturers and academics have absolutely no respect for students.

I'm nearly 40, I've worked for over 20 years in various professions and industries - I have opinions and I'm able to think things through for myself - but the way that some of the staff speak to us you'd think that we were primary school children.

And never mind my age and experience, many of the other students are intelligent and interested - whatever their age and experience.

I wish that staff would show some respect for students - they may know more about certain subjects, they may even be world authorities, but that doesn't make them better people, nor does it mean that they have the right to look down on us in the way they do.

They expect us to respect them, I expect them to respect us in return.

It really pulled the room together....

It's a rug!  It graced the floor of the 'Skills for Life' centre workshop room today - and I for one was very taken with it.

I'd managed to get myself on a 'Dealing with Stress' workshop that the university were running, and so found myself in a room with this rug, and 11 other students (a mixture of undergrads and postgrads, UK and foreign students).

Unfortunately the day wasn't really that helpful. At the beginning he asked us to work out if our symptoms of stress fell into the physical, psychological or behavioural group - 90% of the attendees had no physical signs, but the facilitator spent at least a third of the workshop giving us strategies to deal with something we don't have!

One thing I realised very quickly was that much of the stress in my life is internal. I don't really have a stressful life at the moment, but I am dealing with all the stress I've experienced over the last few years.

He got us to write down our average day and then mark which were stressful - but to be honest there isn't much stress in my day....but I remain stressed by everything that goes on around me.

Hard coding

I knew that the MSc would be a challenge, I knew that there would be things that were difficult to get to grips with......but I never imagine that something could be quite as hard as I'm finding learn very basic PHP.

We were warned, told that we needed basic HTML (which I have), and that learning a programming language would be a challenge, so the fact that I still went ahead and took the module means that I only have myself to blame.

I just don't understand......although when I read stuff online it does make sense and for that reason I can only think that it's actually the way it's being taught.

The lecturer is a lovely guy, and he obviously knows his stuff - but his style of teaching really doesn't match my style of learning. I need to be told what we will be learning, shown an example (step by step) and then given the opportunity to have a go - with help, and with what we are being asked to do being directly comparable to the examples.

So far we are in week five, I haven't learnt a single thing and I've been in tears or walked out of every practical. I have to be able to write some PHP code in order to pass the assessment, and I don't know if I'm going to manage it.......without getting so stressed. Only 15% of the mark comes from the PHP but at the moment it's taking over my life! I've never attempted anything so difficult before! And I hope I never will again.

The Stordy headphones

For one of our modules the lecturers have come up with a way to make sure that no one leaves everything to the last minute.

We have to work with Oracle databases, and they aren't something that you can learn in an evening before the deadline (even if you have some experience of databases).

So the lecturers have made a collection of YouTube video tutorials which are being released weekly. They are then able to check that everyone is doing them and nag those that aren't.

Personally I think that as adults (as I keep being told my fellow students are), we should be left to take responsibility for our own learning......but anyway.

Last week I couldn't hear a bloody thing on the video, it was driving me mad. Finally I discovered that my iPod headphones where knackered.

I'm very pleased with my new pink headphones, although I have discovered that if I'd bought them on the Internet I could have had my new favourite colour - lime green.

Ps. They are named after the lecturer who narrates the videos!

Greenstone

This past few weeks my time seems to have dominated by Greenstone. Unfortunately not the gorgeous New Zealand stone that is often carved into wonderful Maori symbols, but a piece of open source digital library building software.

We were tasked with digitising about 30 analogue items, cassettes, LPs, written items, photographs etc., then using Greenstone we were to put together a library of the items in a way that made sense to the user.

All items were to contain metadata that could the be used to search or browse the library.

I did most of the main digitisation at home, since much of it was SSRG stuff like bout programmes and posters. I had video, and even bought a VHS copy of rollerball to add some clips.

I found building the library relatively easy, and finished it before anyone else - then spent the whole time stressing that I'd done the wrong thing, or hadn't done enough as some people were finding the whole thing really difficult.

Anyway, it's done now and handed in along with an essay about copyright and an initial proposal for my dissertation.

On to the next, an essay about archives and web 2.0 - how exciting!?

Work for free - it will look good on your CV!

It's the time of year when all Masters and some undergrad students are desperately looking round for a dissertation topic - something interesting that will occupy much of their waking thoughts for the next few months.

Often academics in universities will have a long list of ideas or topics that those who want to can pick up. The department I'm in is no different, a list of ideas was circulated a few weeks ago.

Now I'm sure that it goes on everywhere, and perhaps I've just not been paying close enough attention, or (and this is actually more likely), it doesn't happen in humanities subjects; but one of the topics got me rather angry.

Not the topic itself, which actually sounded interesting - research for building a CMS (content management system (website)), evaluating similar sites and implementing a design. So far so good.......and if it were for a local charity or community organisation I'd actually have been interested.

But it's not, it's actually for a local pharmaceutical company - one that appears (from its current website) to be doing rather well.

So, if you haven't worked out my anger yet let me spell it out for you. This company want to use FREE labour to build them a PROFESSIONAL website.

It makes a complete joke of the course in a way, basically making it clear that companies don't value web designers or specialists - a bit like a company saying to a professional photographer "we want you to do a job for us, a professional job - we won't pay you, but it will be good experience".

The argument is that it will "look good on your CV" - but if you want to affectively put 'I don't value my ability and will work for free' on your CV then more fool you!

And this is all before I even consider the fact that it's a pharmaceutical company.

Semester one marks

I've now got all my marks back from the first semester of my MSc and I think it would probably be a good idea to record them here, partly so that when I'm stressing about the next lot of essays and assessments I can look and see how well I did in the first half of the course!! (all marks are out of 100)

For Information Retrieval I got 73 for a report on search technologies for community nurses.

For Information Systems & Information Society I got 72 for the individual essay about Government initiatives to get people online, 74 for group project to make 3 minute film about differing attitudes to community online, and 64 for a group essay about making the film.

For Management and Strategy for electronic digital libraries I got 74 for taking part in a group workshop where I played the role of a small publisher looking to go into epublishing, 70 for an analytical report on the use of tagging in digital libraries and 72 for an group resource about a range of online toolkits.

For Designing usable websites I got 70, a few comments on things I should have done (none a surprise, in fact I would have done the things but couldn't get them to work they way I wanted!).

The marking doesn't seem to have been very consistent, but since my marks are pretty similar (with the exception of the group essay) I'm not complaining - still in line for a distinction.

Today has been a very difficult day.

I have lots of assignments to do for uni, and as usual I'm probably ahead of many of my class mates - that's the way I work.

So yesterday I spent most of the afternoon writing an essay.....I finished at about 3.30pm and saved it to a flash drive (there was a back up in dropbox).

This morning I opened up the file to finish it off......and the fucking thing wasn't there.  The flash drive was corrupted, and the back up copy was so old it was next to useless.

I cried......a lot.  I wanted to phone John, I needed a shoulder to cry on and someone to tell me it would be okay.  Christina was coming to stay but by that time I was upset and grouchy - so I cancelled (and I feel VERY bad about that).

I've not reconstructed the essay yet (I'll tackle that tomorrow), but I did get some stuff done for my dissertation.  Jen and Liz pulled me through the day - and I thank them both for that.  But it's been an exhausting 12 hours, I need to get some sleep and start a new day tomorrow - it WILL be better.

Digitising old school music

This week I have mainly been digitising stuff, some cassettes and a lot of home videos.  It was supposed to be for a project for my course, but I took the opportunity to do some family films - I will share some another time.

What has been interesting is how many of the students on the module had never used a tape recorder, VHS player or record player!! I feel old.

Oriental food goodies

One of the great things about living in a city is having access to different cultures and nationalities.  Sheffield has a bit Chinese population, and therefore there are various shops and supermarkets that sell oriental products.

Often I have no idea what some of these things, many do have the name of the food in English, but then I wouldn't know what the hell to do with them!!  Jen helps with some of them, her Mum is Korean so she can identify the Korean stuff and knows what to do with some of the other items.

Jen and I have found a wonderful little hidden shop/cafe not far from the university.  It sells all kinds of packets of food, but also hot (and cold) steam buns (yum!!) and cakes.  There is a table and two chairs upstairs for coffee, or more downstairs if we really want to hide!

So, today we went in for a coffee, I had normal and Jen had something called 'Bubble tea' - which I might try another time (although I think having it hot is better than cold).

We also bought some biscuits, because the boxes were cute......but the actual biscuits were sooooooo cute.

Hard week

Don't let anyone tell you that students have an easy life - not after the week from hell I've had.

It's Friday and the last day of a week of block teaching; five days of lectures and labs, each starting at 9am and finishing at 5pm.  Yes, yes I know it's the same as a working week (I've done my fair share of those), but the difference is the lack of control over what you are doing, the need to concentrate for hours at a time, and the pressure of knowing that you can't just go and make a cuppa or if you are ill you can take some time out and catch up later.

And it's this last fact that has been the killer for me.  On Tuesday it started with a sore throat, but Wednesday I was feeling very weak and tired, by Thursday it was a raging cold with cough, sore throat, streaming nose and aching all over.  I've not slept properly since Monday, and I'm exhausted.

Literally I've been going to lectures and sleeping - little else.  I don't think I've taken much in in the lectures, and although I've done everything in the labs I was just following instructions, not really knowing why I was going any of it.

Christina is supposed to be coming to stay this weekend, it I don't think I'm feeling up to it.  I'm going to make a decision later, but at the moment I just want to hide under my duvet for a few days.

Word limit

I'm so angry that I need to record this stupidity.  Today I picked up one of my essays, I got a reasonable 67, but then I noticed that actually I'd got 70 but had been docked 3 marks for being over the word limit - I knew I wasn't!

So I looked at the assignment sheet and it clearly stated 'word limit 1500 words, with no more than 5% plus or minus' - so, that meant that I could write an essay of 1575.  Note the words 'no more than'.

My essay had been way over the word limit, so as usual I'd cut it down, even then in the comments I'd got back it had said that some of the sentences were short and clipped (considering I usually get marked down for being too verbose!), I'd had to cut it down by about 700 words - so when I got to 1575 I stopped (and bear in mind that count includes in text referencing).

But 1575 is not more than 5% over the word limit - it is bang ON the word limit.

It seems that in the course hand book the word limit guidance is slightly different, in there it states '5% or more' - so I was by this definition 1 word over the limit!!! So my mark was taken down from a 1st to a 2.1 by someone who is totally unable to use their discretion.

We won't even start on the fact that I also got marked down for something in my referencing that I'd asked about at least three times - I did what I was told, but seems my essay was marked by someone else, and I got marked down for it. 

Postscript: a few days later I got an email to say that the three marks would be given back to me.......but no explanation!

I'm a web designer.....

Do you know how to write HTML? Do you know how to write CSS?  Although a few people I know do, up until a few months ago I knew only enough to put links in this blog and to make text bold or italicised or underlined - my how things have changed.

As part of my course I've done a module called 'Designing Useable Websites', for which the assessment is to design a fully functioning, search engine optimised, accessibile website.  We were given a big block of text, some images and a video and told to get on with it (we did have lectures on the basics).

The choice of what we did with the text was our own, although we couldn't change the content, everything else was up to us.

So, a few weeks later and I have a fully functioning website, we aren't actually launching them on the web, but they have to work as if there were online.

Since I'm old enough to remember the beginnings of the internet, to me my site looks like an early website from the 1990s - but we were only taught the basics, and we had to hand write all the  HTML and CSS, so that meant no copying from other websites and certainly no use of anything such as Dreamweaver!!

This is the front page - I think it's a work of genius and I'm very proud of it. It's taken a lot of swearing and some tears of frustration, my out-of-step son has been a great help when I really got stuck, and Elizabeth Castro's book HTML, XHTML & CSS has been invaluable.