Read(ing week) all about it! Plus Reading Journal: Spring Term, Week 6 (Reading Week)

Cake in Vanbrugh (mine's blatantly on the right)

Ah, reading week. So often a misnomer, but surprisingly accurate in the case of last week (mostly). The weekdays were spent reading in Harry Fairhurst, eating cake and getting very much distracted. I could feel the pressure of the dreaded D-word building, even though it's only a draft proposal due on the 27th and we're not expected to have the entire thing fully planned out. This latter is my stumbling point. However, the reading I did was definitely useful, and now I'm going to try to relax about it a little bit, write a decent proposal for next Monday and then think about the more pressing matters of two summative assignments for the two modules I am actually taking this term. There will be time during Easter to really get down to work on dissertation planning, but for now, CHILDES and minimalism must come first.



Rocking the Bachelor of Medicine hood
with red tights outside Senate House.
Picture courtesy of the boy.

So that was the week. The weekend (which started on Thursday, of course) was a whirl of superb French plays, lots of good food with good company, Audrey's attic, cake with librarians, cocktails with lindy hoppers, pomp, pride, ceremony and church Latin at Queens' College's MA graduation, good ol' night out Revs-style with the Cambridge City Hockey Club and a lovely afternoon spent wandering along the banks of the Cam in the sunshine.

Unrivalled bliss and happiness which I hope will see me through to the end of the Spring Term (or at least until my birthday at the end of week 9).

Dissertation reading

• Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development: language, literacy and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Mueller, N. (1998). Transfer in bilingual first language acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(3), 151-171.
• De Houwer, A. (1998). Comparing error frequencies in monolingual and bilingual acquisition.  Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(3), 173-174.
• Meisel, J.M. (1989). Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children. In: K. Hyltenstam and L.K. Obler, eds. Bilingualism across the lifespan: aspects of acquisition, maturity and loss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ch. 2.

Extra Thing 3: Library widgeting and Thing 9: Drowning under Documentation? Google's lifebelt

As my mammoth catch-up mission continues, this week I'm tackling another two Google applications; one directly, and one indirectly.

My exciting 30th August:
Return library book.
Water plants.
What a rock'n'roll lifestyle.

And as we all like a good beat-about-the-bush, let's start with the indirect one. We have had the library widget on our Classics library page since the last Cam23Things, and it was an incredibly useful tip during the days of buggy Newton. I hadn't realised, however, that you could link your account to your calendar of choice - in my case, the ubiquitous G-word one. It's dependent on the way Google indexes information, so it can be quite slow and, as Lyn pointed out, it's not ideal for our undergrads as our loans are only 2 days whereas, by my reckoning, it took the best part of a working day for Google to update and display my new loan on my calendar. However, it could be useful for our tirelessly-hardworking and techsavvy grads, or our increasingly dippy academics (you know, the kind who forget their kids' names but could reel off line after life of the Odyssey. In ancient Greek.)

A nice, tangible representation of the capability of Google Docs
And it's German :)
Photo by EDO lounge

The other Google application on this post's menu is Google Doc(ument)s. Again, I have used this tool a few times, finding it useful in group work situations during my final year at University, when we had to complete one of the more bizarre tasks of my degree, a group Syntax essay. We saved a considerable amount of time and inbox space by using Google Docs to email round drafts etc., even if we still decided to come together in physical space to finalise things like formatting, which Google Docs is less happy with. I have also used it as a kind of online jotter pad, creating documents to store quotes, poems or links which I want to use later. I hope, however, that some of the bookmarking tools in this week's Thing will largely supplant that.

Google Docs has also been useful from a library perspective; our Google spreadsheet is useful for collecting book requests, and our 'Ask a librarian' form has attracted questions from all over the place, even internationally. I can see how it would be useful for small-scale, embedded surveys, and the information is easy to manipulate from the resulting document.

On a less techy note, I spent my entire weekend (and, thanks to my lovely boss and an empty library, half of Friday) at the Cambridge Folk Festival. A fantastic, eclectic mix of people in the stunning Cambridge sunshine. I recommend Feufollet, Peatbog Faeries, and Ange's superb headwear...