Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Frenzied Fall!

I don't know why it is but fall always seems so frenzied. Part may be that many students in Callen's class have birthdays - so lots of fun parties to attend! We've been to 2 already in the past month and have 2 this weekend. Plus, my work always seems busier in the fall. I'm still not sure why this always seems to be the case.

I know this fall is bad because I'm trying to juggle too many things at work. I have 3 grants right now that are consuming lots of my time. One is just getting up and started so way too many details to handle right now! In addition to these, there is my class I'm teaching and assignments to grade; there's also other papers I'm working on with other colleagues, conferences to prepare presentations for and attend, and lots of other things.

I woke up at 3:30 this morning and was awake till 5. I should have just gotten up and done some work rather than just thinking about what I needed to do today.

Let's hope that things begin to calm down sometime soon!

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Cyber Seniors and Health

As some of you know, I have an NIA grant to go into assisted living communities (ALFs) to train older adults to use computers and the Internet and to assess the impact on their quality of life over time. We finished 6 weeks of training in our first assisted living community yesterday afternoon. The 6 weeks flew by so fast! We learned a huge amount about best practices in training in ALFs. The participants were phenomenal! I hope the skills we helped them acquire will definitely positively impact their quality of life!



We did a debriefing with them at the end of class yesterday to find out their thoughts on ways to enhance the training, how it had impacted them thus far, etc. One person said: "You've made us feel like we're part of the world again." Another noted that "We'd opened up the world for them." They are an amazing group!



The UAB Media Relations rep had issued a local press release to see if any local TV stations wanted to come out to talk to us. I was asked to be on the local Fox news at noon yesterday to talk about the study. I haven't been able to find any online link to the interview but below is one that the local ABC station did. Watch the video if you get a chance. I'm also scheduled to be on Fox' Good Day Alabama Monday morning.



Cyber Seniors: How the Internet Can Affect Health

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

State of the Blogosphere

I came across this report today as I was working on a book chapter (that is due in 2 days!). Interesting to see information on numbers, demographics, etc. of bloggers and blogging in general.