A Heartfelt Thank You!

This morning before I head off to be taught how to access the dreaded online algebra course I'm taking this semester, I want to take a little time to acknowledge the people who have helped me the most. I have gone from staring at a blank page and not having a clue as to how to put anything on it, to being able to enter information and widgets with ease. This was beyond the realm of my comprehension just two short months ago.
First, I must thank Optional and Cathangela over at the ACC forum for their invaluable and ongoing support. Were it not for these two I would have given up within the first week. It was their encouragement and expertise with coding and the like that kept me sane :) Thanks guys for letting me pick your brain! Thanks also to all my buddies over at ACC for the support and especially for not laughing at me when I began this endeavor :) I am also adding a link to one of Matt's sites here because I left him out when I did these thank you's...I'm so sorry Matt...If it were not for you working with me I would have thrown my computer through a window or something....thank you for all the countless hours you spent with me helping me keep this ole piece of junk working :) I hope you know I just plain forgot about you because you weren't involved in the set up of this blog...again I'm sorry...I should have thanked you first because if it were not for your expertise I wouldn't even have had a computer to blog with...sorry I was such an idiot...
Next, I must thank Tobi Shane webmistress of The Social Work Cafe for the ongoing, almost daily (sometimes two and three times daily) support. She has listened to me, provided me with exact, in real time, technical support for problems, made suggestions, provided uplifting conversations and provided my first place for outside exposure! For this I will be eternally grateful. I am truly proud to call Tobi my friend now and hopefully for many years to come!
Thank you also to Dr. Rob for letting me have the healthcare blogger widget, thereby validating my belief that social workers are indeed a viable resource in the healthcare field. Thank you also for having a blog that provides me countless hours of enlightened entertainment.
I believe that all my readers are well aware of my feelings about Andrew, webmaster of Mutual Aid Based Groupwork. He has changed my view of social work completely and made me finally understand the importance of all those dreaded "group assignments" in my courses at school.
Lastly, I would like to thank all the sites that have considered my little blog worthy enough to be added as a resource to their site. It makes me proud to be a part of the social work online community.

Andrew's on Wikipedia!

Andrew Cicchetti has a new entry on Wikipedia
Andrew has the site Mutual Aid Based Groupwork. You can find the link under social work on the left sidebar of this page.
I cannot begin to tell you here just how invaluable this information can be to the social worker. You must go read for yourself. Andrew's writings have given me an entirely different perspective of just what social work is and what it should be. His entry on Wikipedia is a smooth, easy to read, cohesive compilation of his site. The following is an excerpt from Wikipedia:
"Mutual aid as group work technology can be understood as an exchange of help wherein the group member is both the provider as well as the recipient of help in service of achieving common group and individual goals (Borkman, 1999; Gitterman, 2006; Lieberman, 1983; Northen & Kurland, 2001; Schwartz, 1961; Shulman, 2006, Steinberg, 2004; Toseland & Siporin, 1986). The rationale for cultivating mutual aid in the group encounter is premised on the following beliefs: 1) members have strengths, opinions, perspectives, information, and experiences that can be drawn upon to help others in the group; 2) helping others helps the helper, a concept known as the helper-therapy principle (Reissman, 1965) which has been empirically validated (Roberts et al, 1999); and 3) some types of help, such as confrontation, are better received when emanating from a peer rather than the worker (Shulman, 2006). The use of mutual aid based group work has resonance with the needs of a variety of populations. For example, in substance abuse treatment groups mutual aid has been observed to both strengthen self-esteem and affirm the value of a sober network of peers (Cicchetti, in press).
Please do go check it out when you have the time to read and absorb...it is so worth it! :)

Finished!

The changes to the site are complete...for the moment anyway :) Now I can devote my time to searching for reputable, reliable and free links. I hope you find it is easier to navigate around in here. In the future I will probably add more blogs to the list. I still want to devote time and energy to several other subjects within the social work realm, youth-at-risk and critical thinking are two that come immediately to mind. There are many areas in social work I have not covered. As you are reading through the site, thinking of areas you wish I had covered, that I have not, please feel free to leave me a comment and I will do my best to see what I can find. I will tell you this though...except for what has already been included, criminal justice, as a stand alone subject will never be covered. I refuse to compromise my computer by clicking on criminal justice links. In case you haven't noticed every time you click a cj link you are bombarded with ads for online schools and all kinds of other c**p that you can never get off your computer. Good luck with it though! Have a Great Day and Happy Searching!

Changes

Today I will be making changes to the blog. It will no longer be just one. It is no secret I have never been happy with the way this blog navigates and I don't have the time, nor the inclination, to learn html coding, so I have decided to use a simple layout and have separate blogs with two categories each. This will allow for ease of navigation on this site as well as allow extensive room on the other blogs as I find more and more interesting links for you. This will be a time-consuming transition and more than likely will not happen overnight so I hope you will bear with me. I think it will be worth it in the end. :) Have a Great Day and Happy Searching!

:)

Ok, I know I've been playing for a week or so. It's time to get back to business, school starts back in less than a week and I have to go face Algebra for the umpteenth time :(
I want to add links for the elderly and links for the homeless before school starts back. Then I think I will be finished with the different categories and I can just add to them as time goes along. I will try to add one or two to each, every week or so, but my main focus will be algebra and studying for the licensure exam. It is paramount that I finish in December...no more financial aid...kid's grouchy...etc. :-)
It has always been my goal to give my readers/fellow students a great stepping off point. If you've been reading since the beginning then you remember I only promised you great places to start searching. I have thrown in some obscure links that you might not think of, mainly because the very discovery of their existence excited me and I thought it might do the same for you.
I will be adding the links for the elderly today. So far I've not been happy with what I found. This is not a good thing. It tells me those working with the elderly are not publishing websites with their own resources listed. You can imagine how this irks me. I did find one that I personally plan to use...regularly :) The Elder Wisdom Circle. I've taken this excerpt from their "about us" page.
The EWC is a place for people in their teens, 20's and 30's to connect with a Cyber-Grandparent for anonymous personalized advice. Elder Wisdom Circle is organized as a IRS 501(c)3 non-profit association. Most advice-seekers are 14-35 but we reply to everyone. We are based in the San Francisco Bay Area with Elders all over North America. We are one of the largest providers of personal advice anywhere. The mission of our association is to promote and share elder know-how and accumulated wisdom. We also have a goal of elevating the perceived value and worth of our senior community. FREE Advice: Our Elders can help with most any problem providing a personalized reply to each and every request. Our service is totally confidential and easy to use. To seek advice, click [ here ].
Isn't that cool! I've been reading their advice for awhile now and feel truly blessed to have stumbled on this one!
The last category I will be adding will be links for homelessness. I add it last because I've been trying to avoid it altogether. I have so many mixed feelings about the subject, having been so very close to being homeless myself and having had a husband that preferred to live under a bridge with his alcohol over his precious and beautiful son...well, I think you understand. I understand that I would be falling short of my goal to help my fellow social work students were I not to include it. So I will.
As always Happy Searching and Have a Great Day!

LastFM

Hey, you can probably tell I added the LastFM widget today. :-) I have it set to start automatically. Most people would never guess this about me, but, I Love Me Some Blues!!! If by some weird chance, you don't and it's really getting on your nerves, you can click it off by clicking that square button in the top right corner of the widget. Happy listening to go along with your searching!!!

Affordabook.com

Today I want to tell you about a pretty cool place I found. At least it's a pretty cool place for struggling students. When I first heard of it I doubted anyone could beat Amazon for cheap, quality textbooks. I was wrong.
Affordabook.com is unique in that it gives you a comparison of up to 15 different booksellers and surprisingly Amazon was not the cheapest. I was really excited to find this site since it is my last semester and I need to re-purchase some textbooks to study for the licensure exam and don't want to spend much.
It also amazed me that Affordabooks.com had upwards of 300 entries when I typed "social work" into the search bar. I found the older version of Zastrow's Understanding Human Behavior and Social Development, which is the one I used for my class, for $7.83. Amazing! Oh and in Amazon's defense this one was at Amazon. The newer version could be found at AbeBooks for $56.17.
I mention that price at Abebooks because that was one thing I found wrong with Affordabook.com. It was not a bad thing and was probably just an Abebooks updating thing but when I got to Abebooks the price that had been listed as the lowest price was wrong. There were 2 cheaper than the listed price of $61.27 and there wasn't one for the listed price of $61.27. Like I said this was not necessarily a bad thing, just a bit surprising.
Overall I found Affordabook.com easily navigable and the only thing that bothered me other than the aforementioned price discrepancy was the way the books were listed. They were listed 10 to a page and in no particular order. If you had the ISBN number this would not be a problem. It's only a problem for those of us that like to browse and are pretty lazy about it. I would like to see an option for choosing how you want to view the list, either with all the pretty pictures or just by author/title. There are no book descriptions either. If you want a book description then you have to click the link to the site with the lowest price which is not good for a person pressed for time. I would also like to see in the future an "if you like this book then you might like these" or an "other people that purchased this book also purchased x-y-z books" section. I guess if you want that you can do it at the bookseller's site. I only mention it because my site is dedicated to saving social work students time. All-in-all it's a great time-saving site and I would recommend it to everyone out there trying to save a buck on textbooks.

Theories

OK, I know it's been nine days or so since I last posted. The last one and the birthing story were time consuming and yes, the former was traumatic. Reconstructing/reliving that time in my life just to write about it deserved some respite, so I gave it some. It's done and I'm glad it's over.
Hey, do you like my Healthcare Blogger Code of Ethics widget? I'm so proud of it. I don't want to get into the "is social work a healthcare profession" debate because this post could go on for days and possibly turn into a free-for-all, just let me say that Dr. Rob agreed with me and so I have my widget :-). Please check out Dr. Rob's site "Musings of a Distractible Mind" Since I haven't figured out how to put a link into a post yet, the link for it is in the sidebar under "Other Sites/Blogs of Interest". There are great links to other valuable medical blogs on his site.
Sometime today I will be adding the links for Psychological and Social Work theories. I am adding these links because good information on theories is hard to find, especially for the beginning student. I will start with what I have right now in the bookmarks and as I go through that eternally growing stack of papers beside my desk I will add more. Happy Searching!