What does a professor do on sabbatical?

Well, I can only recount what this professor is doing on sabbatical.  The list is long and reflects things that suddenly arose, that were neglected, and things on my "someday-maybe list."

But the best of all is learning new things, practical things.  Developing my web site has been on my "someday-maybe" list for four years, ever since I took Meggin McIntosh's workshop "Make a Difference, Make Money, Teaching Teachers." So it's time to learn iWeb.

Learning how to use Evernote productively is also on the list.

Spending time actually reading all of my RSS feeds would be useful, as will pruning some of them back.

For the learning part, I'm experimenting with Grovo-can't remember how I first heard of Grovo, but so far the free classes have been very useful.

And maybe, just maybe, I'll actually get caught up on all that e-mail (or perhaps I'll just declare e-mail bankruptcy).

Sabbatical!

Sabbatical!  What a wonderful sound that word has, doesn't it?  The root is "sabbath" which literally means "ceasing."  And in this case, it means that I will cease being an interim dean, take a brief rest, and then go back and teach.

I have learned much during these last four years; I've learned to see the world through the eyes of others, I've learned to say "no" more frequently (but still not often enough), I've learned to be a bit more patient, and I've learned that I can't do everything myself.  I'm still not a great delegater but I've learned to delegate a little more.

Perhaps the strongest things that I've learned is that I am "called" to teach, that I miss teaching, that my work life is diminished without student interaction, and that I see teaching as a vocation.  Parker Palmer puts it so beautifully in The Courage to Teach
 

“If we want to grow as teachers -- we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives -- risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.”
― Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life 

 

That might sound kind of abstract but even in teaching something as practical as database design I have learned that unless I am completely present the class doesn't "work" - I need to get into what

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a state of flow, that feeling of total absorption.  And in doing so I think/hope that I share something of myself, of my love for my material.

Somehow that doesn't happen when I'm in a meeting.

Verizon CIO Gets Leadership and Service in Technology Award

Verizon CIO Gets Leadership and Service in Technology Award 
Some times being the Interim Dean is a great job, and this was one of those times.
The video says it all!

Transitions

I'm hoping that I'm "short" as they say in the army.  The search committee is interviewing candidates for the job of Dean, Seidenberg School and I'm planning to be on sabbatical in the fall.  I'll return in Spring 2013 as a professor in the Westchester Information Technology Department.

There are days that I realize how much I will miss this job, and there are days when I realize that I miss teaching more.  I find the relationships with students very rewarding, more rewarding and nurturing than sitting in meetings.  I think my finest moments have been in the classroom, real or virtual, working with a community of learners, as we all learn something new, or see technology in a way we haven't seen it before. 

I put together a "vision board" a year ago, during a workshop with Peggy Cappy at Kripalu.  When I brought it home I found the collage that I did 11 years ago when I was on sabbatical and working through The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron.  That collage has become my desktop picture; here it is:

My iMac Desktop: My Vision Board

Seeing this picture on my Mac each morning reminds me that there is more to life than meetings, or as the Gandhi quote that I have hanging on my bulletin board in my home office tells me, "there is more to life than increasing its speed."

As I look at what I'm planning to be the last four or five years of my work life, I know what I want it to have: fun!  I want to work with people who challenge me, support me and help me grow.  The best part of this job has been the deans with whom I've been privileged to work, colleagues who have done just that: challenged me, supported me and helped me to grow.

As my colleague Fran learned at the recent SunGuard Summit at a talk by Jane McGonigal, the opposite of play isn't work, it's depression.  I want to play at work and play at home.  I just want to play.  With a shout out to Cyndi Lauper, this girl just wants to have fun!

Stay tuned and let's see how this "plays" out.  The best case is someone new takes this job.  The worst case is that someone doesn't.

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....