Great Beginnings for the new year

Well, it has been almost two months since my last post, and it has been whirlwind.

The biggest (and best) news was that on Dec 13th my husband had his kidney cancer removed. It was a four hour surgery and all went well. He had Dr. Park from Urological Associates of Southern Arizona and he did a great job. It was a combination laparoscopic and full incision, which means that they did as much as possible laparoscopically - all the laser/cutting and then just "opened" him up to remove the tumor. It was large - almost 8 lbs. (Think gallon of milk or bowling ball.) I am guessing there is a fancy medical term for this - but I don't know it. What was amazing is that he was released 42 hours after surgery, started walking two, then three times a day, and 4 weeks after surgery he was back to work! (A little tired but not too bad.) Now, almost two months later he is doing just about everything he was before - he says he feels about 95% back to his old self. Yea! And on this past Tuesday, we got the results of his first follow-up tests and they were clean. We have been so blessed. We are so thankful for all the friends and family support and prayers. We couldn't have done it without them.

The second part of this, was that on Dec 14th, the day after surgery, Cal's doctoral degree was posted - He is officially done! He defended in July, but there are APA amendments after that, plus Pepperdine only posts at the end of each trimester - so he had to wait until December. Yea!

Other news...
I am in my second to last semester of school - it is starting to get very exciting, but also scary. One of my classes this year is Research, so we are working on our problem, research question, claim, reason and warrant (not in that order) and of course working on a lit rev. Our project doesn't have to be based on what we are doing (or expecting to be doing) our dissertation on, but it definitely seems to make sense to. We are using a great book, The Craft of Research by Booth, Colomb and Williams. I highly recommend it.

As an academic librarian, that is where my focus is going to be around: I want to look at the new trend of academic libraries use of course pages, to see if there is greater ease to the student and more collaboration with the faculty. I created an acronym - VEER to describe how library resources should be presented to the student V = valuable, E= easy, E= efficient, R = relevant. I believe that if we can meet each of these, that students will use the resources we present to them. We are competing with Google, which is an easy interface, but if searches are not done correctly can lead to massive number of hits (many of which will not be relevant) and the more time you spend on something and with little value in return, you are not using your time very efficiently.

Another great project I am working on is for my consultancy class at Pepperdine University. I am working with Susan Gautsch, the Director of e-Learning in the Graziadio School of Business and Education. She is teaching an MBA course this spring and I am working with her in piloting the Confluence Enterprise wiki that Pepperdine recently acquired. I am really beginning to love this product! It is fairly simple to use (like my wetpaint wiki), but has some additional features that take it to the next level. I am partial to web products that don't require coding. (Always frustrated me that I could only amend/add to my site when I had my computer - which had Dreamweaver. If I was inspired at work or at a conference, with no computer, too bad. I had to keep that momentum going until I got home and had time to do it. With wikis - I just log in, do my business and sign out. Very Sweet! Gosh I love Web 2.0 technologies!!)