Giant

Chris Lott’s post about managing the infostream comes at a time when I’m feeling overwhelmed with competing demands for my time and attention. There are hundreds of unread feeds in my reader, and a dozen open tabs on the web browser while I grade papers, plan lessons, meet with teachers, call parents, and work through the intricate details of managing an e-style writing workshop, learn new math and social studies curricula, participate in a large university sponsored grant-funded science project….business as usual sometimes runs a little heavy. Blogging much? Well, thinking about it isn’t the same as really doing it. Or is it?

Chris advises: “First, and perhaps hardest, we have to learn to be OK with not “keeping up” in the traditional sense.” He recommends learning to feel comfortable “treading water” rather than absorbing everything that comes along. That sounds good to me, because it’s all I can do at the moment. The metaphor of swimming is a good one; going with and across the current, not against it, saving energy.

He said,

Keeping up in the information age doesn’t mean absorbing everything in your immediate vicinity, it means keeping your network tuned and fresh so that the information is there when you need it. The important things find their way to you because they carry some of the energy of other participants.

We need strategies for handling the many things that “find their way” to us. I have a couple.

Google Reader is one of them. It has an ass-kicking keystroke shortcut function for plowing through feeds. The “j” and the “k” keys rip them open, forward and back. (The “k” key is good when I’m too quick with the “j”.) The Command Key (similar to a PC’s alt key?) with a link click opens a new browser tab, without taking me away from the Reader. And I bear down on that “j” key, marking “star” or “share” for things that seem worth looking at again as the titles and opening paragraphs flow past.

I slow down and read more closely whenever something grabs my attention. It’s hard to say what that might be. Later on I look through the open tabs for additional reading. The feeds are set for list view, and they’re set up in folders like different sections of the newspaper. If life gets hectic, and things pile up too deep, I “mark all as read” and forget about it.

And then, there’s the reading. Learning how to read faster is a good trick, so this post from Savage Minds about how to read a book in an hour looked interesting. I’m not a fast reader, and I want to work on this, but I don’t think I could ever read a substantial book in an hour, as cKelty suggests, no matter how well I scan it before I do the actual reading.

The idea of reading a book in an hour seemed audacious enough to grab my attention, but reading web texts is what takes up a fair amount of my time now. This paper about how to read gives some excellent strategies for informational reading. The author, Paul Edwards, details a thinking process for actively making meaning.

He points out that most informational texts are structured so that the more general information is presented in the introduction(s) and conclusion, with the details and examples in the middle. So pay attention to the big ideas at the beginning and the end.

For screen reading, he recommends paraphrasing and questioning as note taking techniques instead of copying and pasting, since meaning is made when we summarize, question, and connect ideas to other texts or personal experiences.

Most books - and blogs - are part of a larger discussion, and getting up to speed with an unfamiliar topic requires a lot of additional reading, which makes the bibliography or references a rich source of background material.

And then, we should remember that there is always a danger of informing ourselves to death, as Neil Postman warned. He saw that when information becomes a consumable commodity, we need to have some place to put it, or something to do with it. The problem isn’t with the amount of information, though. The problem is with our stance toward it. We suffer from information overload when we don’t understand its relevance to the world we live in, to it’s historical and social significance. Postman questions the value of information as a commodity by asking if more information is truly the answer to any of our major problems.

I’ll tread water when it reaches flood stage. Letting go is a survival strategy, too.

Photo Credit: Ed Bartlett at the giant.
Description: Ed Bartlett operating hydraulic mining equipment at Independence Creek in the Circle Mining District. (1913 to 1939). Alaska and Polar Regions Collections, Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks.