Survived and Can Never Go Back
I’m still not quite sure how I did it, but I survived the 2007-8 academic year as Mesa Community College’s instructional technologist. First, this actually needing to be somewhere specific for 30 hours a week...nearly killed me. Yeah, I’m so spoiled being regular faculty. But more interesting to me is the “politics” I played this year. Not that I haven’t known politics existed, or that I haven’t played them before, but this year I got them front and center. And the problem is that once you start playing politics somewhere, even if you no longer are in that position, you really can’t go back to the naive existence. Ahh well...at least I bonded with some good peeps along the way.
One thing that was difficult was “giving up” (ie, not having the time) to do some “important” work like blogging and following various blogs to learn about new technologies. I was watching some of my close friends geek out and I was worried I would lose my geeky edge. But one of the IT guys gave me the ultimate compliment, he mentioned that he was impressed with the skin job on the Maricopa Tech twittercamp instance we had running at the Maricopa Community College District Teaching & Learning with Technology Conference this past Tuesday. I said I did it; he said he had figured it was one of the other tech guys who is good with graphic design. I felt all warm and fuzzy!
Commentary
Yeah, you did a great job! And you can never lose your geeky edge because you have us to keep pulling you back to the geek side.
I was completely impressed. So impressed I may come back again next year!! Stay away from politics unless you’re running for congress because they got good health care and retirement packages!!!
Nice battlestar galactica background!
Coop--Thanks!
Psyan--I loved that I was talking about “skinning” an application (and was working on skinning an application) with a great picture of “skin jobs” at the last supper. Gotta love it!