They’re Back

Anne Truitt Zelenka » Get That Back to School Feeling

Our first year students arrived yesterday, and Anne Truitt Zelenka, editor at large for Web Worker Daily, captured many of the feelings I have every year about this time.

…I love the motion after summer’s pause. I love the thrill of new projects and the renewed energy for old ones. I love the return to making work seriously fun instead of taking vacations that are seriously fun.

Her end-of-summer ritual includes buying a new notebook (of course) and setting out her class schedule that includes some heavy duty corporate consulting and finalizing a book manuscript balanced with some “non-niche” blogging about cooking and eating. She also covers some of the items on her not-to-list like not speaking without pay at conferences, not “building her personal brand” and

I’m not worrying about whether I’m building my career in the way I “should” because building it in the way I enjoy seems to be working just fine. My desultory blogging of the last three years, my connecting with people just because I like them, my non-niche blogging and my sometimes irresponsible approach to my supposed responsibilities has inspired me, motivated me, and connected me in ways I never experienced or imagined before the web.

I’m hoping to capture some of that inspiration, motivation and connection through my on-line writing. My class schedule is pretty full this fall:

• My class in Educational Technology Planning
  will be meeting this fall trying to live out the model of authentic learning that Marilyn Lombardi has written about some so articulately.

• After a year of planning and discussing, we’re launching the reorganization of our Academic Technology staff to shift the balance between desktop work and more substantive academic work. This is pretty stressful, since our faculty satisfaction ratings have been very high,and we’re essentially trying to fix things that most folks don’t think is broken.
• Project Management: We’re trying to become more transparent in the way we select, manage and complete our projects in the TIP program. The list keeps growing…

My not-to-do list not to spend so thinking about writing or regretting not have written. (I would be great if some of that time could be focused on actually writing.) I’m going to start with two assumptions:

• I’m going to worry less about typos. In 25 years, I’ve seldom written a paragraph that didn’t have a word missing or an unfinished thought. Mark Twain said that it is a very uncreative person who can only think of one way to spell a word; I consider myself a somewhat creative person.
• I’m going to write even though I don’t think I have anything to write about.

I’m going to start by hitting publish.