Category: Random Thoughts

Try as we might, we can’t get chat clients to connect to meebo, which means we’re having a rough time staffing our MeeboMe widgets. It worked until sometime earlier this year, and then I spent most of the summer thinking I had done something wrong and trying things here and there to fix it, but now it turns out my co-workers are having the same problem. Any ideas? Or is it time to start looking for a new service to host chat widgets?

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This summer has been a summer of Big Thoughts at work. We’ve been writing our departmental self-study, summing up our present and laying the groundwork for our future. We’ve been grappling with a major project that’s requiring far more thought about everything from logistics to philosophy than I’d anticipated. We’re writing two articles and a college report based on that project, each of which has thwarted us at nearly every step. (And if you’re one of the people who’s waiting for manuscripts of these things, we’re sorry. Really we are. We’re working on them.) Our campus IT department is restructuring, which means that our public service collaborations with them are restructuring, and I’m the library liaison to those things. A new building with a new kind of collaborative learning space is opening next week, so we’ve been thinking big thoughts about how best to balance our enthusiasm for the new service potentials with our capacity to do it all. And somewhere in there, in bits and pieces, Steve and I are working on a book.

And somehow this whole time it’s like I’ve got some sort of mental block. It’s like I can approach that point at which thoughts fall into place and a framework emerges, but I can never quite get there. All the component parts are lying there in a heap on my mental floor, and I can’t seem to disentangle them enough to pull one out, turn it this way and that, and watch it map itself onto the final structure. And so I’m left with a fragile jumble of interesting facts and ideas and a growing sense of frustration and failure.

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My entire life has been shaped by the rhythm of the school year. I was born while my parents were still in school, and as I grew up my siblings and I matched our home school schedules to my dad’s calendar as he collected degrees and then began working as a professor. Then I went to college and then grad school and then more grad school, and finally I ended up working at a college. The circadian rhythm of my year never missed a beat.

The other rhythms of my life — sleeping and waking, energy and resting, socializing and curling up with a book, talking and staying silent — these have all been uprooted in the last few years. The rhythm of the year, though, marches on. September is the beginning, June the ending, and July and August the yearly interregnum. And every year it seems like I have less and less of a clean slate in September, more projects carrying over, more tasks left to catch up on, and yet the feeling that this is the beginning remains.

Happy beginnings to you all, and may this year be whatever you need it to be.

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Getting in front of a captive audience is a powerful thing. Routinely getting in front of a captive audience made up of ever-shifting groups of people from a single population is an even more powerful thing. Suddenly you have the power to distribute knowledge pretty widely through a population. Suddenly lots of people feel they have a stake in what you do while you’re up there, particularly if you are conveying stuff that’s related to whatever those other people want to convey, because they also have lots of things they’d like to have distributed widely through the population. Suddenly you’re a major gatekeeper. It’s a golden opportunity.

But having the opportunity, and even agreeing that the population could benefit from knowing a lot more about what you and everyone else knows, doesn’t necessarily mean that you have good enough motives for including all that information in any given session. I think of my classes, which I try to keep to 3 learning goals, ruthlessly cutting all kinds of useful and interesting stuff. I think of our first year seminars, which have to push back against requests to please make sure “all first year students learn x” from every quarter.

Motives are important things and not all motives are created equal. Opportunities may be fickle, but strong motives make or break the case.

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