Week of January 23, 2012 – Not My Best Week Ever

This happens to be the first week that I could actually sit down and write a reflection. I suppose it’s for lack of trying – I’ve had “reflection/blogging” on my calendar for the last 3 weeks on Friday morning (including today) and this has been the first attempt. I’m not really sure what’s keeping me from doing so. I come into work and try to get caught up on my emails and time ends up getting away from me. If I’m going to follow through with this annual goal, I’m really going to have to start working harder at it. With that, here’s an update on what I’ve been doing this week…WordPress Project. As much as I want this project to be done, it’s far from it. There are things that we’re missing to fully promote the WordPress service. I’ve tried to reach out for updates on the missing pieces, however I’ve had no luck in getting responses. Those groups that are participating in the pilot are asking for assistance, which I completely expected, however without these missing pieces, I can’t reference support documentation that we’ve written. Essentially, without these missing pieces, my level of involvement and work is extremely high and it doesn’t appear to be ending anytime soon. Needless to say, I’m quite frustrated about this.Social Media FLC. This week was our first meeting of the spring term and to be honest, it wasn’t my best meeting thus far. One of the serious problems we’ve run into is teaching schedules are different than the fall (which is to be expected), and this is making scheduling our meetings to be more difficult. We have people who need to come late or leave early and because of that, we can’t have a fully engaging meeting. Aside from that problem, this month’s topics were Skype and social bookmarking and our guest speaker was Jason Abbitt. Jason is a faculty member in the Educational Psychology department at Miami University and has experience using social bookmarking in his classes. His presentation including some data that he collected about the use of social bookmarking and what he would change should he implement this learning activity again. Overall, I thought it was great information and I hope the FLC members thought the same. I’m hoping next month’s meeting goes better for me, but only time will tell. Find out more information about the Faculty Learning Community on the Exploration of Social Media in Higher Education.Course Designs. I’ve been working on 4 course designs since late fall, all of which are currently in full implementation. Overall, my work related to the design/development of the courses is over, however I still feel like I could do more. I received an email from one of the instructors late last week about creating a rubric, and to be honest, I dropped the ball. I was supposed to schedule a meeting with him to work on creating the rubric and I didn’t; I was supposed to prepare a template for said rubric that I could send him, and I didn’t. I’m fairly disappointed in myself about this and I hope things are going well in his course despite my lack of effort.On top of these projects, I was out for 1.5 days because I’ve been feeling under the weather. I’m so glad today is Friday and I hope next week is better.