Blogs

I love this story, and not only because it’s illustrated with a picture of my old dorm. It’s about a minor trend of some residential colleges designating certain dorms as “quiet housing.” The appeal should be obvious to anyone who remembers trying to sleep while someone in the room next door insisted on blasting the English Beat. If memory serves.

The 2012 EDUCAUSE Exhibit Hall (the vendor floor) features 270 edtech companies. From Aastra (booth #669/671 - audio and video conferencing, business continuity, disaster recovery, emergency planning, cloud computing and services, enterprise information systems, wireless) to Xirrus (booth #627/691 - hardware, identity and access management, network infrastructure, network security and applications, wireless) - with anyone and everyone in the edtech space (except Apple) in between.

A couple of months ago, I invited people to join me in “The MOOC Challenge.” Now that I’m half-way through my MOOC – A Crash Course in Creativity, taught by Tina Seelig through the Venture Lab at Stanford University – I’ll give you a mid-term report on the course.

I have lived in Wisconsin for the past 13 years, but I’ve never identified myself as a mid-westerner. Most of my extended family lived or are living in the northeast and many of my friends are on the west coast. I warmed to Wisconsin slowly.

This is not about the election, Instead, it’s about next week’s Big Announcement.

What are your goals for EDUCAUSE 2012? What do you hope to learn at the conference? What insights and information do you hope to take back to your campus?

Recently, a supervisor remarked that I am “too Americanized” and lacking in good-old-fashioned sensitivity [pakiramdam] as Division chair. Clearly, my brand of managing has critics. But as I constantly remind myself and my superiors, I only get half semester load credit for my administrative job. To live the other half of my academic life teaching, doing research and publishing, I have to follow work practices that will get the admin job done in a University machine that is in “low” gear (read: slow decision-making).

As grad students, we face numerous pressures – from academic deadlines to family commitments and maintaining our own health and well-being. However, as many have written before, we struggle to find a balance, tend to give up those things that are healthy but aren’t “productive” and even feel guilty when we take a little time for ourselves.