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....

I'm back-reading Program or Be Programmed

I have a new blog-you can find it here.

I'm still serving as the Interim Dean, so that's why I've got the Dean's blog, but at heart I'm still an Information Systems Professor, so I'll keep this one, too.

And it's an exciting time to be an IS/IT professor. The field is changing, our courses are changing, and the definition of Information Technology is changing. Our students know more about some specific things than we do, but less about the overall field than we do-and that is a problem. One of my colleagues, Joe, sent me a "must read" note about a book, Program or Be Programmed, by Douglas Rushkoff-you can watch a video here. Rushkoff gives me pause.

Why is this different from, say, just getting in my car and driving? Well, for one thing, I usually steer when I drive. Many of the applications we use on the web "steer" us. I'll end with this thought. Rushoff's "ten commandments" are important-here's a snipppet from a review in The Miami Herald:

The author’s Decalogue here is a set of rules of conduct. To wit: Do Not Be ‘Always On;’ Live in Person; You May Always Choose ‘None of the Above;’ You Are Never Completely Right; One Size Does Not Fit All; Be Yourself; Do Not Sell Your Friends; Tell the Truth; Share, Don’t Steal; and Program or Be Programmed.” Each of the command(ments) comprise a chapter.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/11/22/1936739/be-a-driver-or-a-passenger.html#ixzz16USZ3nCx

Being an Interim Dean?

I've been named Interim Dean, effective July 1 (although I jumped right in and am "deaning" now). Should I change the name of this blog? No, I'll just start a new one- The Dean's Diary (http://seidenbergdean.blogspot.com Every Friday I'll post what I did for the week and where I'll be.
Should be interesting-I never thought I'd be dean, never really planned for it but it feels like this is what I was mean to do-isn't that weird?

Graduation!

This is what I've been looking at ALL DAY! Cleaning up e-mail, marking papers, posting grades.

The semester is over and now I can look forward to arguing with students about their papers and working on plans for the Doctor of Professional Studies program.

Oh, and maybe being interim Dean-that will be different!

I love it when people ask what I do all summer. This summer will be no different from earlier summers. I'll work like a dog trying to "catch up" only to realize that I can never catch up. Oh well, I should know better but "hope springs eternal."

My two computers

My two computers,
originally uploaded by caknappprof.

Doesn't everyone have two computers? My trusty go-everywhere-with-me laptop and my favorite iMac? It's hard to believe that when I started working at Pace, back in the "dark ages" I didn't have a computer-I had a terminal that allowed me to connect to the mainframe to read my mail, such as it was!

If anyone had explained to me that I'd have a laptop that went everywhere with me, a cell phone that fit in my pocket and that I had to be careful not to lose, and a PDA that would keep track of all of my phone numbers, passwords and to-do lists, I would have wondered what drugs that person was taking!

I can't remember the last time I held a piece of chalk!