Happy Holidays!

Hard to believe but the semester is over and most of us have turned our thoughts to the holiday season.  I have always found this a perfect time to reflect on the past year and set an intention for the upcoming year.

I have been very influenced by Meg Wheatley, a scholar who has been applying systems theory to organizations.  I highly recommend her book, Perseverance.  In it, she helps to answer the question, what makes some people, even with failures and setbacks, keep doing work that they care about, that they feel is important.

I recommend it because all of us have failures, setbacks, disappointments and obstacles to overcome.  All of us.  And we need to learn to persevere, to "keep on keeping on."  Sometimes school is like that-I know it was for me when I returned at the age of 40 to begin working on my doctorate.  Sometimes work is like that-in the words of Jim Croce, "some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you."

We all just need to keep showing up, to remember that each day is a new beginning.

And so I wish for you and your families and your friends a peace-filled holiday break.  I look forward to seeing you all in the new year, a new beginning of a new semester.

Fall semester, already?

I have absolutely no idea where the summer went, that's for sure.

I worked, we went to Asheville, NC, I worked some more, we went to P'town and hurried back to avoid Irene, and I worked some more.

Oh, I see, I worked all summer, that's where it went!

How I miss the 16 weeks of vacation that I got as a faculty member!  Giving them up was one of the trade offs that I had to weigh when I agreed to serve as the (Interim) dean, but now as I begin year four (!) I find myself really wishing I had been able to take more vacation time.  I could use a complete rest, time away from the rat race, and as Lily Tomlin says, even if you win, you're still a rat!

But now it's the first day of class, and the race is on!

Good luck to all of us, students, teachers, parents.

A New Year, a New Post

Hard for me to believe that it is 2011, but it is. And I've been thinking alot about what we need to be discussing in classrooms.

Yesterday I spent some time with my friend, Deb, who runs an excellent Internet marketing company (you can find more information about her firm here). We wound up talking about Chris Anderson's article in the August issue of Wired, The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet. How can you predict the "next big thing?" Will it really be apps? Deb contends that Facebook is over; what's next?

And how does that affect our curricula?

Things to ponder....