On the day after I was informed that the computing unit where I work at the Petroleum Institute was being downsized for the next academic year, and half the faculty positions there, mine and those of two colleagues, would not be renewed this summer, I found this direct message from Russell Stannard in Twitter. What a morale booster!
The article he is referring to is Stevens, Vance. (2009). Modeling Social Media in Groups, Communities, and Networks. TESL-EJ, Volume 13, Number 3: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/past-issues/volume13/ej51/ej51int/
I tried to embed the screencast.com link here but it didn’t work:
http://screencast.com/t/oSYujWh7
On the downsize front, it seems likely that the computing unit at PI will be subsumed under science or math. There was no explanation given for selection of those who would stay vs. those who would go, but my teaching credentials are not in science (despite my BS in Biology from long ago) so this would be a logical enough explanation for ‘why me’. Quite possibly, I had got myself far enough out the cutting edge that when the blade fell I was simply on the wrong side.
One corroboration of this is that my most innovative teaching materials (on Delicious for example), where I had been trying to move the focus in our unit away from proprietary apps running on standalone PCs and more into cloud-based, collaborative environments, are being dropped from the curriculum next year. My idea to write these materials in such a way that they would teach the teachers while they were using them with students didn’t really ‘take’ with my colleagues where I was working. When I offered training in 2009 and 2010 it attracted more students than teaching peers. My academically crafted suggestions that our institute look into simulations and alternative assessment schemes were politely ignored. Apparently the context where I was working was not right for me and what I was trying to achieve.
Meanwhile I’m looking forward to finding work where my passion for social networking in conjunction with my expertise in educational technology can be utilized and appreciated. This might take some time, but I’ve revised my CV accordingly.
