Welcome to My Blog

Aloha! 

My name is Kiersten Cox. Most people call me Kiersty or even just K. It is much easier for the barista at Starbucks to deal with K than my full name!

Background
I am a Senior Instructor (the highest level) in the School of Information and this blog is for a class I am teaching, LIS 4380, Information and Social Media. I am going to answer all the questions I have asked my students to answer in their blogs.

I grew up in Warren, Ohio which is close to Youngstown. I went to Ohio University, the home of the Bobcats, not the Buckeyes. There I earned a BS in Secondary Education. As an undergrad I worked in the library in the Southeast Asia/Maps/Microform collection. I taught high school for about a year and a half after I graduated, and then I went back to OU. I earned a Master's in International Affairs with a concentration in Southeast Asian Studies and worked full-time as a librarian in the Southeast Asian Collection at Alden Library.

Next, I moved to Hawai'i. I lived there for 6 years. I earned a 2nd Master's in Library and Information Science from the University of Hawai'i. Along with that I worked as a librarian for The Honolulu Academy of Arts, and as the Resource Coordinator for the Cancer Information Service of Hawai'i.

From Hawai'i I moved to Makassar, Indonesia where I was a research assistant for a PhD student who was on a Fulbright Scholarship. After Indonesia we moved to the Netherlands for a few months. Then it was on to Colorado for seven months of winter and then here to Tampa, in 1998, where it is rarely winter. I have been teaching here at USF since 2003.

Social Media
I use a lot of social media both in my teaching and in my personal life. After Canvas which is a social media platform (I bet you never thought of it that way!) the one that I use to most is Twitter. I mostly don't tweet. I just read posts from people I follow and catch up on the news. I use a whole lot of other platforms because I have an almost 13 year old daughter. But the platform I love the most is Wikipedia! Did that surprise you? I know you hear all the time how bad Wikipedia is but that's just not true. It is very accurate and timely and very egalitarian. Plus where else has a featured article of the day about The London and North Western Railway War Memorial?

Blogging

You may have noticed I didn't mention blogging above. It isn't my go to social media. Though if you think about it, discussion boards in Canvas are really blogs and I post to those a lot. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc... posts are also similar to blogs. So while I don't post to formal blogs other than this one, I do however read blogs. I tend to read news blogs, and travel blogs. But since I work full time and am a single mom the time I devote to reading blogs is limited. My 12 year old daughter however watches several vlogs on YouTube and follows a lot of people on TikTok. I am not sure I really approve of that but it is what kids do.What I like about blogs is that anyone can post but that is also a disadvantage. There are no gatekeepers ensuring the quality of information.

The Fun Stuff
It is hard to limit my post to only 3-4 fun things about me. I tend to lead an interesting life whether I want to or not. So my first fun fact is I love to travel with my daughter and friends. In the last few years of course there has been limited travel due to Covid-19 but in the few years prior I visited Hawai'i, Vietnam, France, Finland, Palestine, Israel and several US states. I actually took my daughter to Hawai'i and France in 2017. She loved both places. This past summer we were able to go visit my Dad and Step-mom in Corpus Christi, TX. Paris is my favorite city in the world, so far. Don't believe what people say about the French. Even before the 2003 politeness/smile campaign, the French were mostly friendly to me. The only place I've ever had anyone be really offensively, personally rude to me was in Toronto, but as my Canadian friends like to point out the rude people were from Quebec and were speaking French when they were making derogatory remarks. Since everyone in my group spoke French, things did go as anticipated by those rude people.

Another fun tidbit is that I am a stray animal magnet. I have 3 pets currently, but kitten season is about to start and it would be unusual for me not to have at least 1 kitten turn up. As for my own pets, 2 years ago 2 chihuahas walked up to my house and are now mine. I have never had such small dogs. They are cute but are pushy and the smallest of them thinks he is a killer. I also have a cat that wandered up to my house. On Thanksgiving 10 years ago a 1/2 grown cat walked into my house. She is still here. In the last year she has become an entirely indoor cat. She is not very happy about being an indoor cat and she hates the chihuahas! However, she is safe from my neighborhood coyotes.

The third fun thing I am going to tell you is that I think it is cool that I have seen snow not only in the usual places like the US, Canada, Asia and Europe; I have also seen it in Mexico, Hawai'i, and South Africa! I want to add seeing snow in South American and New Zealand to my list.