This coming semester (Spring 2012), I’ll be once again teaching a course called Educational Technology for School Leaders. This is a masters- or post-masters-level graduate course. The course is fully online (almost entirely “asynchronous;” there will be webinar-style sessions held at specific times, but “attending” those will not be mandatory and they’ll be recorded/archived/posted for after-the-fact viewing). The course is also an “open” course in that (nearly) everything we do will be “public.”

The course is also “open” in the sense that there are slots available for registration from anyone outside of VCU.¹. Maybe you’d like to learn with us this semester? Or, maybe you know someone who should or would like to? A little more about the course:

The “official” course description (i.e. the one in the VCU course catalog) reads:

Provides an overview of the impact of technology, particularly Web-based technologies, on K-12 instruction, from pedagogical considerations and associated tool choices to more pragmatic leadership issues of planning, funding and faculty development. This course is designed for administrators, teacher leaders and other interested professionals who are or intend to be leaders in technology.

In other words, this course is designed for sitting and/or aspiring school leaders who want to explore the intersection of school leadership and educational technology. Furthermore, the course is loosely framed around the National Educational Technology Standards for Administrators (NETS-A).

Fun will be had and lots of learning will happen. If you, or someone you know, would like to take the course, please contact me (or have them contact me).

NOTE: there is tuition associated with registering for the course. Including fees, tuition for the 3-credit course for VA residents is $1,119. For those outside of VA, the tuition is $2,727 (I’m just the messenger!).

 photo credit: IntelFreePress

1. The course is not SO “open” that I’m accepting students who are not formally registered for the course. There will be many opportunities for peripheral participation, though

We lost two giant minds last night.

From Steve Jobs:

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

And, on Derrick Bell:

But in Mr. Bell’s hands, the narrative technique became an accepted mode of legal scholarship, giving female, Latino and gay scholars a new way of introducing their experiences into legal discourse. Reviewing “Faces at the Bottom of the Well,” Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times wrote: “The stories challenge old assumptions and then linger in the mind in a way that a more conventionally scholarly treatment of the same themes would be unlikely to do.

I don’t normally find inspiration in the lives of others and especially not through quotes. But, I find myself particularly moved this morning, inspired to continue to be the one who is crazy enough to challenge old assumptions.

Thanks for all you did, gentlemen.

No! Real classrooms, schools and districts.

We need to stop calling high-tech classrooms or schools of the future. They’re happening NOW!

We need to stop asking if technology integration is related to improved test scores. It’s about learning, not test scores!

I spent a little time today collecting videos about “lighthouse” classrooms, schools, districts, etc. Here are just some. Most of those who read this post will be familiar with many of the names and faces. For some, though, these videos will highlight new names, faces, ideas, etc. So, I place these videos here in the spirit of possibility.

Science Leadership Academy (Philadelphia, PA)

High Tech High (San Diego, CA)

New York City iSchool

Mooresville, NC (“Digital Conversion”)

There are more, many more, but these are places where I know people and where I can trust that the videos aren’t just marketing puffery.

To repeat, I’m teaching a fully online course this semester called “Educational Technology for School Leaders.”

The course site is almost ready for launch.

As part of the course, I’ll be asking the students to “shadow” a school leader who actively uses social media for professional purposes. My hope is that by virtually shadowing a sitting school leader, the aspiring school leaders in the course will see what’s possible and consider the affordances of social media for school leaders.

What is “virtual shadowing?” Heck if I know; I’m making this up, I think. You can read the current assignment description, but, basically, I plan to ask the students to:

• Follow their mentor on Twitter (my preference is that the students actually start a Twitter account and follow their mentor that way, but they can also just regularly read their mentor’s Twitter page).
• Read any blog posts their mentor writes.
• Send an email to their mentor to find out if there are other spaces that are public where they might see their mentor engaged in professional practice.

I would ask the mentors to basically be themselves, to “act normally” (i.e. no dog-and-pony shows). The students will be shadowing their mentors for 6-8 weeks, so I’m not asking mentors to do any extra blogging (micro- or long form blogging) within any condensed period of time. I hope my students will reach out to you and interact with you online, but we’ll see; this is a new assignment/activity for me.

I only have five students right now so I need five fine school leaders to volunteer as mentors. If you are an educator in a formal leadership position¹ who is an active user of social media (Twitter, blog, etc.), please be in touch.

Thanks for your consideration!

1. yeah, I know that’s going to cause some unease, but I really want my students to see that there are folks in positions that require administrative certification who are active social media users

This coming semester (Fall 2011), I’ll be teaching a course called Educational Technology for School Leaders. This is a masters- or post-masters-level graduate course. The course is fully online (almost entirely “asynchronous;” there will be webinar-style sessions held at specific times, but “attending” those will not be mandatory and they’ll be recorded/archived/posted for after-the-fact viewing). The course is also an “open” course in that (nearly) everything we do will be “public.”

The course is also “open” in the sense that there are slots available for registration from anyone outside of VCU.¹. Maybe you’d like to learn with us this semester? Or, maybe you know someone who should or would like to? A little more about the course:

The “official” course description (i.e. the one in the VCU course catalog) reads:

Provides an overview of the impact of technology, particularly Web-based technologies, on K-12 instruction, from pedagogical considerations and associated tool choices to more pragmatic leadership issues of planning, funding and faculty development. This course is designed for administrators, teacher leaders and other interested professionals who are or intend to be leaders in technology.

In other words, this course is designed for sitting and/or aspiring school leaders who want to explore the intersection of school leadership and educational technology. Furthermore, the course is loosely framed around the National Educational Technology Standards for Administrators (NETS-A).

Fun will be had and lots of learning will happen. If you, or someone you know, would like to take the course, please contact me (or have them contact me). I’d give you my contact information, but that would inconsistent with the anti-teaching stance I’ll be taking this semester…

Update: Per Meredith’s question in the first comment (and more to the little footnote below), there is tuition associated with registering for the course. Including fees, tuition for the 3-credit course for VA residents is $1,119. For those outside of VA, the tuition is $2,727 (I’m just the messenger!).

 photo credit: paul (dex)

1. The course is not SO “open” that I’m accepting students who are not formally registered for the course. There will be many opportunities for peripheral participation, though

[NOTE 1: this is a follow-up post to something I wrote that was published in the UCEA Review (warning: pdf) and posted to the UCEA website. That was about how technology affords scholars the opportunity to be public with their work and to disseminate their knowledge more widely. Here, I write about how technology affords us new ways of thinking about and "knowing" how impactful our work is, especially when we use the open web for knowledge dissemination.]

[NOTE 2: There are many scholars who have studied/thought/written about impact factor for much longer than I have. I write this as an early synthesis of what I've learned and specifically for my colleagues in the field of education.]

[NOTE 3: I'm writing this here, now, but I'm also thinking that I can combine the earlier piece, this piece, and maybe a bit on modern forms of peer-review to create a more comprehensive "article" on modern scholarship in education to be submitted to an open access, peer-reviewed journal.]

Impact factor is a metric used to quantify the quality of a journal. It is basically a measure reflecting the relative frequency with which articles in a journal are cited in science and social science journals. There are a few different such measures, but the one most commonly referred to is the impact factor computed by Thompson Reuters ISI, which houses a massive index of academic journals (the “Web of Science”). This particular impact factor is computed as a fraction: the numerator is the number of citations a journal received in a given year to articles published in the previous two years¹; the denominator is the total number of articles published in that journal over those two previous years. As an example, to compute a 2010 impact factor for a journal (call it Journal J), let’s say that Journal J published 50 total articles in 2008 and 2009. If 25 articles published in 2010 in other journals (or in Journal J) cited articles published in Journal J during 2008 or 2009, Journal J would have an impact factor of 0.5 in 2010. In other words, on average, each of the articles published in Journal J in 2008 and 2009 was cited 0.5 times in 2010.

Those of you in the professoriate are likely in the same position as me, where tenure and/or promotion are tied to scholarly output, which is largely judged by the impact factors of the journals in which we have published. That is, we largely judge each other’s scholarship based on impact factor.

Numerous critiques of this “quantification of quality” have been made. In a recent article in the Journal of Philosophy of Education, Smeyers & Burbules (2011) offer a particularly compelling critique. They offer a number of problems with the way impact factors are computed and used. Consider just the following four concerns:

1. First and foremost, the numerator does not include citations/references in books, book chapters, newspapers, or web-based publications (which is particularly problematic in the age of digital information).
2. The impact factor is a journal-level metric and not necessarily an indicator of article quality. They cite an example offered by Monastersky (2005): “…a quarter of the articles in Nature last year drew 89 percent of the citations to that journal, so a vast majority of the articles received far fewer than the average of 32 citations reflected in the most recent impact factor.”
3. Furthermore, among the 25% of articles that drew 89% of the citations, one article might have been cited frequently (thus driving up the impact factor of the journal that it is in) when it is actually being “…cited critically, as a bad example or as a foil for another argument.” In this way, impact factor may be more a measure of publicity than quality.
4. Finally, there is the self-fulfilling nature of the impact factor. We might call this the social construction of journal quality. For example, if you were to ask any professor of educational leadership what the “top” journal in the field is, you would more often than not hear “Educational Administration Quarterly (EAQ).” Why? Because we are socialized within the discipline to believe that. Therefore, scholars within the discipline read that journal most frequently and look to it most frequently for warrants for their knowledge claims. Lazy Busy scholars of educational leadership will not necessarily find the time to search for the best warrants. So, of course EAQ articles will be cited more frequently, thus boosting its impact factor.

Smeyers & Burbules are most convincing when writing about the privileged place of quantification in academia.

There is something intrinsically reifying about measures like impact factors: they are a god-send for overworked and distracted officials, because they serve as a handy shortcut; they obviate the need for more difficult and potentially controversial judgments, such as actually reading and arguing over the value of scholarship; their pseudo-scientific aura seems to protect review processes from certain kinds of challenge,including legal challenge, because everyone is treated ‘the same’ procedurally and held to ‘the same’ criteria.

Smeyers & Burbules mention alternate methods of computing impact factors (see e.g. the Australian government’s Australian Research Council,  HERE and HERE). They also address the “future of the impact factor” and throw out possibilities such as “counting downloads, or hyperlinks…,” but, ultimately, come up short in this part of the article.

For “overworked and distracted officials,” short of expecting them to actually read and make independent judgments of a body of scholarship, the question, then, is how might we “judge” impact in the future. Or, stated differently, if we take seriously the idea of scholars as public intellectuals embracing the affordances of the open web, it behooves us to consider how to rethink “impact factor.”

Fortunately, there are pieces of a puzzle that are starting to come together. There are certainly other ideas out there, but consider these four possibilities:

• Rick Hess’s public presence ranking system is far from perfect. He uses a combination of Google scholar, Amazon.com, and mentions in widely-disseminated education publications (namely Education Week and the Chronicle of Higher Education), blogs, newspapers, and the Congressional Record.
• Hess’ use of use of the Google Scholar score preceded Google’s announcement of Google Scholar Citations which is, “a statistical model based on author names, bibliographic data, and article content to group articles likely written by the same author.” Once an author identifies her articles, Google collects citations to them, computes three different dynamic citation metrics (they are automatically updated as new citations to articles are found) and graphs the metrics over time.

Those two approaches allow us to think about two things: the use of multiple measures to get at “impact,” and how one might start to scrape data from the open web. Getting a bit more technologically sophisticated, however, we start to see some greater possibilities.

• brainSCANr (The Brain Systems, Connections, Associations, and Network Relationships) is a budding/growing system that explores the relationships between terms (in their case, for now, neuroscience) in peer-reviewed publications. As is written on their homepage, the system “…assumes that somewhere in all the chaos and noise of the more than 20 million papers…there must be some order and rationality.” By clicking here, you see a dynamic sociograph of the term “happiness” is related to other terms within the articles in the PubMed database. The image below is a static version of the sociograph pulled on August 3, 2011.

While BrainSCANr is a technology used to examine relationships between terms, it does not take a huge stretch to imagine a similar system that examines relationships between articles, authors, etc. BrainSCANr uses social network analysis (SNA) which can be used to generate statistics related to the density of a network or the centrality of a node (which could be an individual, an idea, an article, etc.). Density of a network around an article is not unlike current impact factor metrics, but centrality metrics might add to our thinking about impact.

• In addition to centrality within a network of articles/ideas, we might also consider adding “engagement” metrics to a multi-factored look at impact. PostRank “monitors and collects social engagement events correlated with online content in real-time across the web. PostRank gathers where and when stories generate comments, bookmarks, tweets, and other forms of interaction from a host of social hubs.” PostRank has been acquired by Google. Recently, the folks at PostRank ran a “quick experiment” to see if they could determine what the most engaging TED talks have been. The initial result was a spreadsheet of 766 TED talks, which has become a dynamic site where you can view TED talks ranked by PostRank’s engagement score. Engagement is measured by the number of times a given talk has been tweeted, bookmarked (on Delicious), posted (to Facebook), and voted (on Reddit). Engagement is essentially a measure of virality.

Public presence, density, centrality, engagement…these are concepts that we need to embrace and harness as we re-think what “impact factor” might look like as scholars disseminate knowledge more widely on the open web. Modern archiving and computing technologies allow us to do SO much better than relying on outdated, limited, self-fulfilling metrics of impact factor.

1. It is important to note that for the Thompson Reuters ISI impact factor, only citations from and to journals that are indexed in the Web of Science get counted.

I suck at (real) gardening (the kind related to botany). If there’s an opposite to green, that’s what color my thumbs are.

I fear that my inadequacies are bleeding over into a metaphorical form of gardening. Nancy White, co-author of Digital habitats: Stewarding technology for communities, has written about online community building as gardening.

I have informally taken on the role of online community manager for our department. Nobody appointed me as such; in fact, nobody even asked me to do this work. However, I feel strongly that there is value in wrapping social media around our department. My main goal in doing so is to break down traditional barriers to learning: time, space, etc.  Our learning together as a department of educational leadership no longer needs to be confined by classrooms, courses, semesters, meetings, etc. Also, as the coordinator of the educational leadership track of the Ph.D. program in education, I have worked really hard (with my colleagues) to build a real sense of community around the doctoral program. We have f-2-f colloquia, social events, etc., all in the name of community-building. So, my current online community management efforts are complementary to that work, and extended beyond the doctoral program to the department as a whole.

I’ve tried the “one at a time” approach before, and I’ve tried to find the “one best tool.” Fruitless; both of those (see e.g. this nearly empty rundown garden…) So, I decided to go “all in” and build an online community that’s multi-faceted. I’m taking my cue from this post about building a knowledge ecology. That is, I’m using a variety of tools with no clear idea where I am headed… I know that post is about an individual’s knowledge ecology rather than a collective community, but I think the advice applies to what I am trying to accomplish. So, here’s what I’ve done:

Department Facebook group – if Facebook is good at anything, it’s community. I know that many of our students have Facebook accounts, so I’m partly trying to meet them where they are with this group page. I envision the Facebook group page as a space for interaction, both social and professional. We’ll list events here, make announcements, etc.

Department Twitter account – I can count on one hand the number of faculty and/or students associated with our department that have Twitter accounts. But, Twitter is a fantastic way for those outside the department to become connected to what is happening within the department. For example, whenever one of our new Ed.D. students publishes on their blog, it is automatically broadcast through the department Twitter account. Now, anyone (any where at any time) who follows our Twitter account is alerted to the blog post and can choose to comment and engage with our students.

Diigo group – I’ve named this our doctoral group, but I’d welcome any student in our department (or outside…) as a member. I regularly bookmark sites/articles relevant to the work of educational leadership, and now, by adding them to this group, I’m curating those resources for the members.  But, I shouldn’t be the only curator and I don’t have to be; that’s the beauty of “social bookmarking.”

Ed.D. blog – we have three new cohorts of students in our Ed.D. program. As part of our assessment of their learning, we are asking all of the students to maintain a digital portfolio using WordPress. Part of that digital portfolio is to be a blog page where students reflect on their learning. Purposefully, there are no minimums or guidelines with respect to the blog. Students were told to post to their blog as often as they feel moved to do so. I aggregated all (currently 38) of the blogs into this single blog using FeedWordpress.

I’m working to integrate these tools and build in purposeful redundancy. So, for example, the Ed.D. blog auto-posts to the Twitter account (I’m working on getting it to auto update to the Facebook group…). I also use the Diigo group to bookmark some of the articles I share via Twitter and Facebook. I don’t expect everyone to adopt all of these technologies. In fact, I want students and faculty colleagues to be able to find the tools that work best for them; this redundancy, it seems to me, makes that more of a possibility.

Early returns are not great. I did manage to get 21 students to join the Facebook group, but only a couple have responded to anything I’ve posted so far. One of my newest colleagues wrote on the Facebook page “I tend to use my facebook for personal reasons…I don’t envision using facebook to do more work, sorry!” (In her defense, she’s a brand new hire who doesn’t technically start until the fall semester and she doesn’t have the context from which the Facebook group idea surfaced…but, still…). A good month or so after working with the Ed.D. students on their portfolios (with associated blogs), only a handful or so are actually blogging. And, nobody is commenting on the other posts. One of the Ed.D. students has (appropriately) pushed back by saying, “…We have an aggregate blog that will divide conversations between two places, in effect replacing the “one stop shop” aspect of Blackboard’s discussions or Facebook” and “…listening to so many channels is both confusing and frustrating.” Ouch!

Alright, then, let me have it. It’s early, but what am I doing wrong? Got any good “gardening” tips for me?

 photo credit: garryknight

University-based educational leadership programs are structured differently across universities. There are masters programs, post-masters certificate programs, and doctoral programs (Ph.D. and Ed.D.). Some educational leadership departments refer to certain programs explicitly as “principal preparation” programs and even “superintendent prep” programs. I’ve not worked at a university with a superintendency program, so I can’t speak to the content of those programs. But, generally, across leadership prep programs, there are commonalities in coverage. There are courses in school law, school finance, school/community relations, organizational theory, etc. The tables of contents of the “classic” textbooks on educational leadership have not changed much over the years.

While I’m sure there is some coverage of educational policy issues in educational leadership programs, I’m less certain that anyone is preparing sitting and aspiring school leaders to be policy advocates. I’m not suggesting that we can “cover” everything that sitting and aspiring school leaders need to know and be able to do as school leaders, but two recent stories have me wondering if we do enough to help sitting and aspiring school leaders become policy advocates.

I’ve long thought of Pam Moran and Dave Doty as strong, forward-thinking school superintendents. But, while I’ve spent some good quality time with Pam in the “real” world, I was largely basing my opinion of them on my interactions with them through various forms of social media.

Last week, Dr. Moran was one of five brave superintendents in the Commonwealth of Virginia who lobbied state Superintendent of Public Instruction Patricia I. Wright for some flexibility in the state’s accountability system. They worte to Dr. Wright and met with her. According to this article in the Washington Post, other superintendents in Virginia are on board with them, but Dr. Moran and her four colleagues took the time to meet with Dr. Wright personally. They were making an impassioned argument based on what they think is best for the children of their respective school divisions (and, presumably, the rest of the Commonwealth).

Dr. Doty is engaged in a similar struggle with the state department of education in Utah. Apparently Dr. Doty is on board with the goals of a state law requiring districts to keep parents apprised of the progress of their children, but he does not think state education agencies should require the use of any one assessment.

Waging policy battles in public is a brave act for school leaders. Pitting one’s district against the policy agenda proffered by a state education agency is a particularly difficult and complex battle. However, by all accounts, these leaders are willing to serve as advocates for the children they serve, at great professional risk.

I say “bravo” to these superintendents who are willing to put on their “policy advocate” hats and engage educational policy makers at “higher” levels of government in crucial conversations about important educational policy issues.

photo credit: ranchocanyon

In the Spring 2011 semester, I’m teaching a fully online, doctoral-level course called The Politics of Education.  I have designed the course as an open course, though I don’t know if it qualifies as a “Massively Open Online Course” (a MOOC; described nicely by Dave Cormier). The course is “open” in at least three ways. First, it’s open in that everything we do in the course is public. The two main spaces we’ll be working in are our Google Site and our Posterous blog.

Second, the course is open to anyone who would like to enroll and earn three credits through the VCU School of Education. If you are interested in this option, please be in touch and I will get you all of the information you need.

Finally, the course is open to your participation. You can be involved in at least the following ways:

1. The students enrolled for credit will be reflecting on the readings (that they choose) and other information shared through various channels (Diigo, Twitter, etc.); they will be doing it on our Posterous blog. Please consider subscribing to the site and/or commenting on posts. I expect less than a dozen credit-seeking students in the course, so the Posterous site becomes a multi-authored blog with weekly themes. Your participation as commenters would be greatly appreciated.
2. I will be hosting semi-regular “webinars” or virtual roundtables through Wimba Live Classroom. Those will be open to the public, and you are welcome to “attend” and participate. I’m still finalizing the schedule, but it will be posted on the Google Site. I will also announce the events on the Google Site, the Posterous blog, and on Twitter.
3. Based largely on an assignment by Michael Wesch, students get to choose which articles they read (about the topic of the week and within certain guidelines) and then fill out a form that summarizes/synthesizes the article. The form generates a database that becomes searchable, sortable, etc. The database gets updated real-time and is embedded into the Google Site (it’s currently populated by summaries generated from students who took this course last time I taught it). You are more than welcome to use that form to add to the database if you read an article that’s relevant to a course on the politics of education.
4. We’ll be using #adms707 as a tag in Diigo and Twitter. If I can work out the kinks, all of the course-related RSS feeds (blog, Diigo, Twitter) will show up on this page on the Google Site. You can follow the hashtag on Twitter in whatever way(s) you follow tags, and if you’d like to join our Diigo group, let me know.

Other ways to participate may surface; I’m trying to be flexible about the design of the course. The course begins next week (the week of January 17, 2011).

To whet your whistle, I created a little video introduction to the course:

A dear colleague/friend just told me that I seem “depressed;” that my “joy and enthusiasm aren’t present much of the time” that we are in the same room.

How’s that for a wake up call?

Needless to say, I’ve been doing some soul-searching since reading that and will continue to do so. At this point, I believe that I’m not “depressed” (at least not in a clinical sense). However, I do think I’ve become frustrated and even angry. Having spent the better part of the last 12-18 months engaged in conversations at the intersection of educational technology, leadership and reform and seeing very little change beyond small pockets of “innovation” has caused me terrible frustration. If you believe most of what I’ve read/seen/heard over the last year or so, the entire P-20 system is headed off a cliff, and only those with great foresight and agility will avoid the cliff dive. “Foresight” and “agile” are not characteristics of most schooling organizations of which I know.

That said, surely there is more to my psychological state than my frustrations with the P-20 educational system. So, since the new academic year is upon us (our first full-faculty meeting is next week), I thought I’d make some new (academic) year’s resolutions.

First and foremost, I’m going to make it a point to be more “present,” to live more “in the moment.” That’s always been a problem for me, even before the digital age and the era of continuous partial attention. I live in my head a lot and I’m always thinking about what I have to do, want to do, etc. My generalized anxiety largely prevents me from being truly present. I don’t know that social media and other forms of technology have exacerbated my inability to be present, but I’m certain they haven’t helped.  I intend to revisit the works of Jon Kabat-Zinn who writes/speaks about mindfulness. I was introduced to his work a long time ago by my wife and one of her psychologist friends. Before our first child was born, my wife bought me a copy of Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting. I read most of it, but not closely enough; ironically, I wasn’t able to really be present with the text.

I don’t know (yet) if being more “present” and more “in the moment” necessarily means disconnecting/unplugging and/or “going off the grid;” that’s something I’ll have to interrogate. But, I know that unless it’s necessary, I’m not going to open my laptop during meetings, conferences, etc. I’m pretty good about doing the same during time with my wife and kids, but I’m going to make it a point to be truly with them during family time. Also, I’m going to try to rid myself of negative influences and to avoid interacting with people who don’t add value to my life. One step in that direction is to significantly reduce the number of individuals I follow on Twitter. Too much of what I read/see there causes me to wince and I can’t afford that right now. In general, I need to significantly “prune and tune” (I credit Howard Rheingold for this terminology, but I can’t find where he said that) my network.

My second resolution is to really pursue my passions. I hope this doesn’t sound too selfish, but I have to learn to say “no” more often and pursue the sort of work that I really want to do. I feel pretty confident that some of my frustration/anger comes from having to do so much work that is important, but just not that interesting to me. I’m fortunate to be in a position where I *can* say “no” if I need to and in a place where I *can* pursue my interests. There’s no question that I get lost in my head and in various social media pursuits because I’m bored with going through the motions related to certain parts of my professional life.  There’s also the lingering reality of having to apply for tenure relatively soon, and I’m not going to get there by agreeing to do too many things that don’t advance my own individual agenda.

So, this (academic) year will be guided by two “P”s: presence and passion.

I may add to these resolutions in the next week or so. We’ll see.

What are your new (academic) year’s resolutions?