Ugh, bad eyes

I’m trying to get stuff accomplished on this project, but it is hard to concentrate. I think that is partly because I am having some problems with my vision, and I keep getting a headache. I am very nearsighted, and as a result my retinas are much thinner than a normal person’s. That means that sometimes weird things happen–for example, for the past two or three years I have had subretinal neovascularizations, which is where a blood vessel attempts to grow through my retina. This causes flashes and means that I need to get an injection of a drug called Lucentis into my eye. So far it is an inconvenience, but definitely not the worst thing in the world to deal with.

A few weeks ago, however, I started seeing a much bigger flash, and after some time at the retinologist’s office I found out that I have a mysterious, thin scar on my left retina. It means that there is a long, thin blurry patch in my visual field (although thankfully not in the center of my vision), and that I see the scar as a bright spot whenever I blink, close my eye, or look at a bright light source like a computer monitor. I’m sure that I will get used to it in a few weeks, though, and then I will be able to see as well as I could before it happened.

I’m also trying to put together a prototype of the possible changes for DiscoverLibrary. I wish I was a more efficient user of Photoshop, because my designs look fine but they take hours to produce. I’m sure that it will be worth it when the prototype is done, though. Ideally, users will be able to click around in it as though it were a dummy version of the real DiscoverLibrary site.

Udacity

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on the CS 101 course through Udacity. Like Khan Academy, Udacity seeks to provide education for free to anyone who wants to learn.  I’m excited to see where this new educational model goes, and what kind of students will take advantage of it. Although Udacity assumes that you have access to a computer and the internet as well as time to work through the courses, this can provide an amazing educational opportunity for nontraditional students. I looked through the forums yesterday, and it was wonderful to see the students who are taking the course–there are a lot of older, younger, and international students all learning together.

This particular course focuses on learning Python to build a tiny functional search engine in seven weeks. We are nearly halfway through, and I’m enjoying the course tremendously. I haven’t really done any programming since a C++ course I took in college more than a decade ago, but Python is not as hard as I thought it would be.

 

Finding trends

Looking at the responses I got for the test has been really interesting. Take a look at the current DiscoverLibrary site here.

Some of the test subjects said that the first thing they would do would be to click on the big “sign in” call to action in the middle of the page, but not one of them had any idea that they already had an account. Many of the comments said that they would not read the wall of text on the main page. Nobody saw the “Databases by Subject” link, because it does not look like something you would be able to click on.

I am going to work up a prototype this weekend with Photoshop and InVision that will incorporate some of these changes so that the librarians who work on the DiscoverLibrary site can visualize what some of these changes might look like. It would be rewarding for me to be able to make a lasting difference with my practicum so that its users would find the site easier to navigate and use.