Looking Ahead to AY 2010-2011

When I started this blog, one of the things I intended to do was to give people a glimpse of what academic life is like. So, I thought I would shift gears for the month of August and talk a little bit about what I am thinking about for the upcoming academic year.It is now August and that means two things. Summer classes are over and I have to start working on my classes for the Fall.

There is a caricature of an old professor teaching from yellowing, faded notes that he developed when he was a newly minted PhD and hasn't  updated since. If you ever find that guy, let me know. I'd like to get a few tips from him. I post my teaching materials on  a website for students to download. For years I have been attempting to get them set up so I can just copy the materials from one semester to the next. I have yet to achieve that. I am always tinkering, trying out new ideas, polishing bits that didn't work as well as I would have liked, experimenting with new techniques and assignments. So, every semester I review and revise my notes and syllabus before uploading them once again. A chunk of August will be devoted to that. I like to begin the school year with all my teaching materials completed because things will get crazy as the year gets underway and I will not have time to get back to my notes later in the semester.

I will also be doing some writing. Two of the classes I teach do not have appropriate books available for them. This is because I cooked up the ideas for the classes rather than just following somebody else's work. I write a lot but since my ideas are not mainstream I have not had a great deal of luck with publishers. So, I decided to make them available as a free download at my website. More about that later.

I am also planning to take on a new research project this coming year. It is an outgrowth of my work in other areas. I want to examine the role of imagination in information systems research. Talk about outside the mainstream. No wonder I have trouble finding publishers.

We will also taking some new directions with the school beginning this year. We moved into a new building a couple years ago. And we have a new Dean, whom I have not yet met, beginning in September. The school is primed for change. It will be interesting to see which way it goes.