Another Academic Year Begins

How many jobs are there where you get a fresh start twice a year. You get to start over again, fix your mistakes and put more effort into the things that worked. Well, there are not many jobs like that but being an academic is one of them. We get two fresh starts every year. We call them semesters. This really is one of the best things about being an academic. Every time a semester ends you can review it and see what did not work out as well as you would have liked. And every time a semester begins you have a chance to try again.

Fortunately, I am happy to say, most of the things I am working on are working well. I have three major classes which are my teaching focus and they are all advancing nicely. I used to teach way more classes and did not do nearly as good of a job. But, I am pleased to say that my classes are going well.

My research is not going as well as it has in the past. But, there are several reasons for that which are not really important enough to get into here. But, with my new interest in imagination I will be slowly getting that back on track again.

I have invested heavily, time wise, over the past five years in virtual worlds. Sadly, all that effort did not pay off as well as I thought it would. There are many reasons for that and they are probably not important enough to elaborate on. This is also one of the reasons why my research lagged. I was hoping for some productive new veins of research   in virtual worlds. That did not come about.

However, I am turning my attention from virtual worlds to social interaction technologies. Hopefully, this will pan out a little better.

A new semester begins to today. And with it begins new initiatives, new ideas, new hopes and new directions. What more could one ask for?

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.

Role Play and Roles

The roles that I discussed in the last post can be thought of as roles defined in a bottom up fashion. That is, you do something which indicates a role preference and then get suggestions for other things that maybe be suitable to someone who enjoys that role. But, bottom up role definition has some problems.

Let's say that you are a creative, artistic, imaginative person who has for some reason been steered away from being who you are naturally. Let's say further that you have adopted a serious person complete with a set of interests that are appropriate for that serious persona but not really suitable to who you are. If your serious person reads only nonfiction then it is likely that bottom up approach will only reinforce this mismatch. You order dull books on history and the algorithms suggest more history books. How do you break this cycle?

I think one answer may be virtual world role play. I run into endless people in Second Life who are there because they can behave in ways that feel much more natural and yet would not be acceptable for some reason in real life.

Several months back, I wrote a few posts on a concept called StrengthsFinders which was developed by the Gallup Corporation. The premise of StrengthsFinders is that there are certain things that you are hard wired to do and doing those things are virtually effortless for you. I think this idea can be extended beyond business strengths to roles in general. There are things you can do that are virtually effortless and feel natural. If you do those things life is easier and more satisfying. However, for any number of reasons people often get steered away from roles that are natural for them and into roles that are not natural. Role playing in a virtual world allows you to explore different roles and possibly find roles that are more satisfying for you. 

In the Beginning there was Computation

There is an apocryphal quote attributed to Thomas Watson the head of IBM at the time the computer was invented. As the story goes, when asked about the size of the world market for computers, he replied "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers". Although there is little evidence that he actually said this, the story has taken on the status of urban legend and is also revealing of our understanding of computers at the time.

The computer was not really invented in the 1940's, it was resurrected. Charles Babbage did the foundation work in the early 1800's attempting to develop a machine that could compute the roots of polynomials. That notion of a computational machine stuck in the very name of the device that we still, to this very day, call a computer. Early computers were not seen, as they would be later, as information processing machines. They were seen as computational machines. Hence the name and the misunderstanding of the market implied by the apocryphal quote. If the computer had remained a mega calculator there may very well have been a very limited market for it.

Fortunately, some of the engineers at IBM, at the time, had a little imagination and could see beyond the basic computational capabilities. I can imagine that this caused no end of internal conflict at IBM as their cash cow, at the time, was the Electronic Accounting Machine which processed information on paper cards. Suggesting that the computer be used for this purpose was not only a suggestion that they replace their entire business with a new mode of processing, but it also suggested that information be encoded, not on cards which you can see, but in bits of electricity that you cannot see. So, although this seems obvious in hindsight, it was quite a leap of imagination at the time.

By the late 1960's the use of computers in automating business record keeping systems was in full swing. In fact, computation was, at this point, a fairly minor use of computer power. The computer resources used, for example, to compute your pay check are minor compared to the processing necessary to get the information ready for the computation and producing the paycheck once the computation is completed. If the name of these machines was updated along with their function, they would have been called automaters rather than computers. But, that did not seem very important at the time. So the old name stuck.

The point that I would like to close this piece with is - the computational power of computers led to the use of computers for automation. And this theme of computer usage leading to greater usages will be expanded upon in subsequent posts.

Elements of Apocalyptic Thinking

The roots of apocalyptic thinking are so fundamental to the way we see the world that it is difficult to see this as anything other just the way the world is. However, it is not the way the world is. It is the way we see the world. Before attempting to justify that claim, let me lay out the elements of apocalyptic thinking.

First, there is a belief that their is a 'right' way that things should be and they have gotten off track from that. Second, if we don't do something to set things right, forces beyond out control will set them right for us. Further, there is an element of retribution in the forces beyond our control setting things right. That is, there is some element of punishment for not have kept things on track for ourselves.

Let's say that an unfortunate investor put money in a lot of risky "get rich quick" schemes and landing up loosing everything as well as incurring a lot of debt in the process. Consider the following two statements.

1) He got what he deserved for trying to get rich quick.

2) The probability of loosing everything increases as the riskiness of investments increases. However, there is also a chance you could win big. There are also possibilities for small losses or small gains.

The first of the two statements is more of a moral assessment than an objective assessment. People should work hard and invest prudently. If they do not, bad things will happen. The second allows for the fact that when people gamble, some people actually do win. So retribution is not built into the fabric of reality.

We would like to believe that retribution is built into the fabric of reality. Consequently, we tend to notice instances where the apparent retribution takes place, while ignoring cases where it does not. Thus, our selective data gathering tends to support what we would like to believe is the case.

There are several problems with the elements of apocalypticism. First, the 'right' way is something we impose on the world based on our human values. Doing all the 'right' things makes the human race prosper and grow. This probably not the 'right' thing for the other inhabitants of the planet. Second, the forces of nature are, well, the forces of nature. They do not bring things back into line with human values. They just do what they do. Third, although we do see elements of equilibrium in nature, equilibrium is not retribution.

We apply this apocalyptic notion of retribution to issues of all sizes from individual to social to global. And the magnitude of the retribution ranges from small hand slaps to total destruction of human life. In the next post we will take up the range of applications of this notion.

Allowing Possibilties

Another way to increase your mental flexibility and improve your ability to be proactive with new ideas is to take an idea that you may normally reject out of hand and allow the possibility that it may be true - or, at least, that it may have merit. We tend to see life as black and white, and even the shades of gray do not allow for the variety of possibilities that are really out there. Is monarchy better than democracy? Would society be better if everybody was not equal? Should there be a mandatory age at which people are terminated? I choose these examples because they are ideas that most people would not even want to consider.

However, each of these ideas does have merit. And by finding the merit in these ideas, you can see that it is better to consider ideas than to reject them out of hand. I suspect that most people, after considering them, would still reject them. However, consider this: Monarchies can be more efficient than democracies. Regardless, of what we might want to believe, everybody is not equal. And as people age, their maintenance costs increase while their productivity decreases. Might that money not be better spent on younger people?

This exercise is useful to see that even the most offensive of ideas still have some merit. And that raises the question - what other ideas that really do have merit have we simply rejected out of hand?

In the following few posts I am going to consider a question that I alluded to earlier. In our modern secular age, do people still believe in the apocalypse? I am gong to argue that they do. I am going to argue that the children of the enlightenment are not nearly as secular and modern as they like to think that they are and that there is abundant evidence that apocalyptic thinking still dominates our modern world view. Do you think I can convince you? Well, stay tuned.

Being Proactive with New Ideas

The alternative to being reactive to new ideas is to be proactive with them. That is, instead of accepting new ideas when there is absolutely no other choice, embrace them early and consider the possibilities and implications.

There are three primary advantages to being proactive. First, you have more time to adjust to new ideas. That is you can work through the implications and how they will affect you before you actually have to accept them. This advanced preparation is less of a psychological shock. Second, you can, potentially, take advantage of new ideas by thinking them through before hand. And third, you are less likely to become out of touch over time as each new idea by itself is not as threatening as an accumulation of new ideas.

There are, of course, disadvantages to being proactive with new ideas. You don't want to jump on every bandwagon that comes along. Not every new idea survives. In fact, most don't. So, if you are overly proactive to new ideas, it looks like you are just following fads. And, in fact, you may well be.

So, how do you embrace important new ideas and not jump on every bandwagon that comes along? First, you have to evaluate new ideas critically. Look at them intellectually rather than emotionally. Our emotional reactions to new ideas may not be the best assessment as they are, well, new. Emotions are good judgements but tend to work a little better in situations where we have some experience. We need to step back and evaluate new ideas critically rather than just reacting to them. Second, we need to reflect on our successes and failures. Did we accept ideas that didn't work out? Did we fail to accept an idea that did prove its metal? Over time you can get better at this.

Personally, I think being proactive is the best strategy in a dynamic world. And if you are going to be proactive, you have to refine your approach.

Being Reactive to New Ideas

In the last post, I mentioned that you can face new ideas with one of two predispositions. You can be reactive or proactive. A reactive person resists new ideas until the support for them is so overwhelming that they have no choice but to accept them. The primary benefit of this approach is that you don't have to accept every silly idea that comes along. New ideas often come along like fads and die out just as quickly. The reactive person invests no time or energy in these ideas until they have clearly proven their worthiness. The problem, of course, is how much evidence is required to prove the worthiness of an idea?

At one extreme if the person does not require much evidence before accepting a new idea, then they are really just being a proactive person but not doing it very well. At the other extreme, they may be way out of step with the people around them having failed to accept ideas that have become mainstream.

Personally, I would find it difficult to be a reactive person for two reasons. First, I would find it hard to know when it is time to give in. And, second, I would find it difficult to have to finally give in to an idea that I had resist for a long time. Further, I would find the idea of having to continually adjust and give in to new ideas difficult. But that is me and others may be different.

I would think that being reactive would be a good approach for one who is living in static times. However, for one who is living in dynamic times where things are constantly changing, this would be a strain. I would think that for dynamic times such as the present that being proactive to new ideas would be a lot easier on a person. And that is what I will turn to in the next post.

A Willing Suspension of Disbelief

I borrowed this phrase from William Coleridge who said that the enjoyment of fiction requires "A Willing Suspension of Disbelief". In other words, you have to believe, at some level, that the fictional representations are or could be true. If you read fiction with skepticism, you may fail to fully appreciate the literary experience. However, I would also like to apply this phrase to the advancement of knowledge.Which, in my opinion, also requires a willing suspension of disbelief.

At any given moment in time, most of what most people believe is not fully true or possibly out right wrong. We are constantly changing, updating and modifying our shared bodies of knowledge. These changes can come in huge jumps like Newton's theory of gravity or Einstein's theory of relativity. And they can come in little hops like the decision to exclude Pluto as a planet. Personal knowledge changes as well. Anyone can attest from their own personal experiences that things that they used to believe no longer seem to hold. The question is - how do we get from one position on what we believe to be true to another position on what we believe to be true?

It seems to me that this can be done, generally, in one of two ways: proactively or re actively. We do it re actively when we simply cannot hold an old view any longer. We do it proactively when we allow for the fact that new evidence may arise and that we may have to change our minds about some things. If we are being really proactive, we can anticipate the implications of new information and consider what might possibly be true as a result. And if we wish to be proactive, it requires a willing suspension of disbelief.

I am not going to judge whether it is better to be proactive or reactive. This is probably a matter of personal taste, personality, disposition, flexibility and any number of other things. I can say that for me, the preference is very much in the proactive camp. I prefer to know what might be true long before it becomes established. However, for the sake of fairness, I am going to look at the pros and cons of being reactive versus being proactive. Then I will develop an example - apocalyptic thinking. Yes, it could be true.

Believing Fiction

Last week's suggestion for improving you mental flexibility was pretty straightforward - just continue to expose yourself to new ideas. This week's suggestion is going to be a little further out there.

Next time you read a work of fiction, try an convince yourself that the story is actually true. This is not too difficult if it is a romance or detective fiction. Such things could actually happen and many times are based on true stories. However, what about horror or science fiction? Could you convince yourself that Stephen King's The Stand or Micheal Crichton's The Andromeda Strain really happened? Could you convince yourself that either is based on a true story?

Actually, the premise of The Andromeda Strain (a lethal microbial life form was brought back to earth on a space probe) is plausible. So, is the premise of The Stand (the military experiments with a deadly virus which escapes into the world). Since they are plausible, they could have really happened. Why wouldn't you have heard about them? Well, there are lots of reasons why such events might be covered up. As you look for explanations to support your claim that these things really did occur, you find that it isn't that difficult to come up with plausible scenarios. In fact, this is what conspiracy theorists do all the time.

The point here is not to make you paranoid or to turn you into a conspiracy theorist. The point is to show you that, with the proper motivation, it is not that difficult to convince yourself of something. And, if you managed to convince yourself of something here that you know is not true, how many of the other things that you believe to be true are nothing more than things you have convinced yourself of in the past for various reasons.

For any given person, much of what they believe to be truth is, in fact, not true. George Washington never did cut down a cherry tree. And the people in Columbus's Day did not believe the world was flat. Many of you believed, at some point, that Pluto was one of the nine planets. Similarly, for any given person, some of what they believe to be false, is, in fact, true. Nobody has it all exactly right. But your mind, vulnerable to inflexibility, will lead you to believe that you do have it exactly right. Hopefully, the mental exercise described here will help you maintain greater flexibility and allow you to update your view of the world as new information comes along.

Receiving New Ideas

There is an oft told zen story about a student who is frustrated with his inability to grasp the ideas that his master is trying to teach him.

"I am just not getting it," the student complains to the master, "what should I do?"

The master invites the student to sit and offers him some tea. The student accepts the offer and the master begins to pour tea into the students cup. The cup fills and begins to overflow onto the table.

"Master," the student exclaims, "My cup is full."

"That is your problem," the master replies, "your cup is full."

When your mind is full of things, you cannot receive new ideas. It is too full of the old ideas. And the longer the old ideas stay in there, the harder is it to replace them with new ones. This is a problem because the world is constantly changing and it is necessary to accept new ideas in order to keep up with it. After a while you become very rigid in your views. They become more inconsistent with the world around you. And you can find fewer and fewer people who would agree with you on things. So, what do you do.

Well, the answer is fairly simple, actually. You have to be diligent in your acceptance of new idea. When you read the newspaper, for example, instead of reading it from the perspective that they are all idiots and you are the only one who really knows what is going on, read it from the perspective that there may actually be something in there to be learned. That doesn't mean to just naively accept everything. But it does mean to give it a fair chance.

And, that is only a start. You should seek out new ideas and new ways of looking at things. Read books, take classes, explore new ideas. Watch movies and TV shows that you would not normally be attracted to. It has to be an active effort.

Just like you have to get off the couch and get some exercise, you have get out of the valley your mind has settled into and exercise it with some new ideas. New ideas are the key to mental flexibility and it takes effort to achieve it.

Keeping Your Mind Sharp and Agile

Over time our thinking become very rigid. Our minds shrink wrap around the things we know and resist letting in new ideas. This is not good for most people and for academics it is a disaster. It would be analogous to a professional athlete becoming soft and doughy from lack of exercise. Fortunately for professional athletes their careers are relatively short and when the natural effects of aging set in, they no longer have the demands of their profession to deal with. However, for academics this is not the case. Academics can continue to practice their profession well into old age. We have a comedic archetype of an aging academic reading from yellowing pages of notes lingering for years at deaths door while continuing to deliver lectures. This archetype is a bit unfair. But, it is not unheard of to have academics continue to work well into their 70's or even 80's. So, the question is - how do you keep your mind nimble and sharp and resist the forces of aging?

Well, part of the answer is that many academics don't. Some begin their careers fixed in their views and some acquire the rigidity over time. However, this is unfortunate and not necessary. It is possible to remain nimble and flexible in your thinking. And it is not a great deal different from maintaining physical flexibility.

In the absent of any efforts to combat inflexibility, our bodies become inflexible over time. Muscles shorten and we loose our range of motion. We combat this by stretching. And the same thing is true of mental flexibility. We combat it by stretching our minds. I would add, parenthetically, that we also become inflexible emotionally, psychologically, spiritually and in any number of other ways. The remedies there are the same - stretching. But, I am going to limit my discussion to mental flexibility.

Over the next few weeks I am going to look at three ways to maintain mental flexibility: exposure to new ideas; using fiction for mental exercise; and the pursuit of non conventional ideas. Warning: This will start out exactly as you expect and get very weird before it is all done.

Is This Really The Best Way To Do Things?

The past few posts on the nature and role of the university may cause people to ask if this is really the best way to do things. The answer, I believe, is yes! If universities were any more efficient they would be dangerous. In order to explain that outrageous claim, allow me to digress for a moment.

Machiavelli, the author of late Medieval book of real politic called The Prince, provided sage advice for keeping a Prince in power. However, what few people know is that he had second thoughts later in life about the advice that he had given. When you think about it, a monarchy is really the most effective form of government as long as two conditions occur. First, the monarch must understand what it good for the people he or she is governing. And, second, the monarch must be competent enough to achieve what is good for the people. If the monarch is corrupt (or at least does not make the needs of people primary) or if he or she is incompetent, then monarchy is not such a good idea. And therein lies the problem. Given what we know about people and human nature, it is unlikely that these conditions will be met. Hence we need a form of government that does not rely so much on a single person.

In steps democracy. It isn't that democracy is the most effective form of government. It isn't. It is slow, ineffective and often contrary. However, given our understanding of human nature, it is the most likely to be the most effective over time. It is not the most efficient. It is the most risk free. A monarch can use his or her power to very efficiently take a nation in a very wrong direction. If a democracy goes in a wrong direction it does so very slowly with much debate and discussion and many opportunities for correction.

Universities are similar to democracy in that they are slow, inefficient, and often contrary. However, as the guardians of reality, that is exactly what we want. We do not want to go tooling off in the wrong direction with great efficiency. We want to make sure that if we go in a wrong direction we do so slowly with much debate and many opportunities for correction.

Indeed, if you look at the history of universities, this is exactly what happens. It is exactly what we want to have happen. And therefore it is the best way to do things over the long term.

Guardians of Reality

Our perception of reality is in a constant state of flux. I use the phrase "Our perception of" to avoid philosophical arguments although the statement is equally as true without it. What appeared to be real to an ancient Egyptian was very different from what appeared real to an ancient Greek. Different again for a Medieval noble, and different again for scholar during the enlightenment. Our modern view and postmodern views are, again, very different. We can loosely define reality as our perceptions of the physical world, our social structures and values, and our spiritual expressions. It is what we think, believe, feel, experience and so on. And it is constantly changing. The comedian Lily Tomlin once said "What is reality, anyway? Just a collective hunch" And that is about as serviceable as any philosophical attempt to nail it down any further.

Reality changes because we are changing. We try new things. We learn new things. We reject old idea and accept new idea. We have new experiences and new concepts. If our perception of reality were static, they would, over time, fail to meet our needs. And, at the same time, if they changed too fast we would have a hard time keeping up with it all. So, in order to maintain the stability of reality we need a social institution that is on one hand tasked with advancing reality, and, at the same time responsible for maintaining its stability. And that social institution is the university. A couple easy examples will clearly illustrate this.

First consider the role of the university in education. On one hand the university indoctrinates students into the corpus of existing knowledge. This is a reality maintenance function. On the other hand, university classes encourage students to think for themselves. This is the advancement function. How can you tell students on one hand to learn what you are teaching them and one the other hand to think for themselves? Well, it is just part of the role of the university in maintaining and advancng reality.

Second consider the role of the university in research. On one hand the university generates new ideas. H.L. Mencken once said "There is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who believes it". One of the responsibilities of the faculty is to put forth and entertain new ideas. There is no tenet of our worldview that didn't start out as a stupid idea at some point. And yet, there are processes in place to keep stupid ideas from escaping out into the world of real people. There are tenure committees, peer reviews, commentary, viscous fights between differing schools of thought and so on. So the university allows reality to advance by adding new ideas, while keeping that advancement from happening too rapidly.

So when we complain about the vagaries of the university - the teachers who no longer want to teach, the researchers who no longer wish to pursue research, the administrators who came to the university to avoid administration only find them selves in administrative roles - you have ask: is the guardianship of reality important and can you think of any better way to do it?

Academic Service

There is a rich assortment of Academic Service roles within the University which I am going to simplify into two categories: voluntary committee work and paid administrative work. Voluntary committees usually involve some sort of policy making while administrative roles generally involve running something. Neither hold up particularly well to scrutiny.

Most academics have some sort of voluntary committee work and the effort required can vary greatly. There are committees that literally never meet and these are considered plum assignments as one can meet their obligations for service without doing anything. Other committees meet frequently and are usually addressing a problem that the committee members feel is important. The two extremes are rare and most committees meet now and then with limited attendance and limited productivity. As far as I can see, committees serve two purposes. First, they engage faculty in the workings of the university and allow faculty to meet other faculty that they might otherwise have no way of knowing. This is a good thing because faculty tend to become rather isolated in their teaching and research. Getting to know other faculty helps develop a sense of community among the faculty. The second is that committees keep faculty engaged in the policies of the university. Again, faculty tend to become rather isolated in their teaching and research. So committees allow them to stay in touch with any changes that may be brewing. People often forget that these are the two primary purposes for committee work and think that committees should be productive; that is, they should get something done. This misses the point and if a committee gets something done, it is a by product of the other two objectives.

Far fewer faculty have paid administrative roles. These roles include running a department, a program, or a school, all the way up to major administrative roles within the university. As I mentioned earlier, most academics prefer life at the university to the administrative life in a corporation. So why do some faculty migrate into these roles. In fairness, I should say that some if not many did it reluctantly. However, may actually pursue these roles. And there are two reasons, as far as I can see why they would do this. First, it needs to be done. That is, somebody has to do it. Faculty are an odd group of people and are reluctant to be led by someone who does not understand what they do. As a practical matter this means another academic. Academia is a culture unto itself. And one of the tenets of that culture is to only accept leaders from within the ranks. The second reason, also touched upon earlier, is that at some point most academics run out of steam for teaching and research. If they wish to remain vital and contributing administrative service roles provide that opportunity.

People looking at the univeristy from the outside often see the inner workings as bizarre, non productive and often neurotic. But, there are good reasons for the university being the way that it is. Universities are the "Guardians of Reality". And that will be the topic for next time.

Service: The Saftey Net of the Dispossessed

One of the great ironies of academic life is that many bright young people pursue academic careers because they find the idea of administrative life in the corporate world to be less than desirable. And, then, they find themselves, after a productive decade or two, in the administrative life of the university. The reason for this is that it is very difficult to sustain your productivity in research over the long term. And it is equally as difficult to sustain your enthusiasm for teaching.

There are three reasons why it is difficult to sustain your productivity in research. First, research requires mental energy. Mental energy declines as one ages and one is unlikely to engage in challenging new research as they get older. Second, research requires enthusiasm. Younger researchers are often driven by a desire to discover and be recognized for that discovery. As you publish paper after paper that few people care about, it is difficult to maintain that idealistic enthusiasm. Finally, the audience for research can be very fickle. What was a hot topic one decade can be a hard sell the next and an impossible sell after that. Since one is unlikely to embark on new avenues of research later in their career, they find that there is simply no audience for what they would like to write papers about.

Similarly, it is difficult to sustain your enthusiasm for teaching. Initially, it is a heady experience standing up in front of an audience of students and telling them things that they want to know or need to know. It is also quite satisfying to adjust over time to their challenges. Further, it is exciting to learn new things and pass them on. However, at some point there are no new challenges in the classroom. You have been asked every conceivable question multiple times. Students fade into one another as you have difficult remembering all the names. And you, some times, dread giving a lecture as you know you may very well bore yourself.

This does not happen to everyone. But it does happen to an overwhelming majority. This is really the point where one should move on to other things. But, if you have been an academic all your life and know nothing else, what can you move on to. The answer, of course is service to the university. There are any number of service roles from voluntary committee work to well paid administrative positions. Next time we will explore the richness of those alternatives.

Blessings and Curses

Now and then I like to provide some insight into life as an academic. And since I don't have a better topic on my mind this morning I thought I would write about one of the greatest blessings of my academic professional life. And that is that I have an enormous amount of control over my time. The things that I have to do are limited. I have to meet with my classes and when it gets down to it that is probably about it. If you don't show up for your classes the university could terminate your tenure. So that can be thought of as a hard requirement.

There are also firm requirements. I need to prepare for my classes. While I actually spend an enormous amount of time preparing for my classes, there is a wide variation in how much time academics spend in general. I spend a lot of time for several reasons. First, I am interested in the material that I teach so broadening and deepen my knowledge is something I enjoy doing. Second, I like teaching so I am constantly looking for ways to improve the delivery. Third, my field of Information Technology is constantly changing so just keeping up with what is going on requires time (in fact, a LOT of time). It would not be unrealistic to say that I spend two to four hours in preparation for each hour I teach. However, I think I am at an extreme end of the spectrum. It is easily conceivable that once one has their lectures nailed down they may spend very little, if any, time in preparation. But, clearly, if one puts in no preparation time for their classes, it will eventually show up on course evaluations. So, it is best to be prepared. This is a firm requirement because you have some wiggle room in how you pursue it. But, if it gets bad enough you can be pulled out of the classroom with dire consequences.

If one were to think about this in terms of hours per week, the hard and firm requirements could translate into as few as four hours a week (two 2 hours classes with no preparation time) and as many as 22 1/2 hours per week (three 2 1/2 hour classes with two hours of preparation for each hour of class) .

One of my colleagues once joked that the nice thing about being an academic is the flexibility - you can work any 80 hours a week that you choose. But how did we get from a range of 2 to 20 hours of hard and firm requirements to 80 hours a week? The answer is that the flexibility which is a blessing is also a curse. And as we get into the soft requirements next time that curse will become more obvious.

Power, Wealth and Fame

I listened to a book on CD last week entitled 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. It provided 48 laws (actually conflicting pieces of advice) on how to become powerful or more powerful. It was worth listening to and most of the advice was fairly sound although it would still take a fair amount of thought and reflection to apply it to the greatest advantage. Many of the reviews of the book on Amazon were offended by the Machiavellian tone of the book and this got me to thinking about power and related goals such as wealth or fame.

Aristotle said that happiness is the only goal that we seek as an end in itself. We want to be happy simply because we want to be happy. However, other goals, such as power, wealth or fame, we want because we think they will make us happy. I think the thing that offended the reviewers on Amazon was that this book provided rules to make yourself more powerful without asking if you wanted to be powerful, how much power you really wanted or whether you wanted to pursue power as an end in itself.

We actually know a fair amount about how to achieve power, wealth and fame. The problem is that most people are unwilling to do what it takes to achieve them. Why is that? I think the problem is that these are not end goals in themselves. They are sub goals in the pursuit of happiness. If we have to do something that makes us unhappy in the pursuit of happiness then we have defeated our attempts. But, let us say for the sake of argument that we can pursue these goals without doing anything unpleasant. Is there still a problem?

Yes, there is. The problem is conversion. Money itselfs does not make one happy. It is the things one can do with money that increases happiness. Power does not make one happy. Again it is the things one can do with power that may increase their happiness. If one acquires a large amount of money, power or fame and has not figured out how to convert them into happiness then the whole exercise has been pointless. There is nothing inherently wrong with the pursuit of power, wealth or fame as long as it is done in the context of a meaningful and satisfying life.

Ah, 2010

The New Year is officially underway. Two thousand and ten. Or, I suppose, Twenty Ten. I am not sure who gets to decide what the proper way to say it is. But no matter. It is upon us and I think it is going to be a great year. There has been much talk about the past decade and how is was the decade from Hell. I have to admit that it was a rough decade and I do think things will get better in the next decade.

It is nice having these cyclical patterns to time - weeks, months, years, decades. They give us a way to structure our time and have built in points of reflection and improvement. I have resolutions for the New Year as I do every year. I am a big fan of reflecting on a time cycle; seeing what when right and what went wrong; and having a shot at improving it next time around. In an earlier post I mentioned how I do this each semester.

Over break, I made substantial revisions to the two classes that I will be teaching in the Spring. I also made some further progress on a book that I am writing entitled Writing Stories to Explore the Ethics of Technology. I have decided that when I have the first draft of the book completed, I will make it available on my website for free. I think more academics should do this. The whole publishing business has gone so far off track that it can only be justified as an alternative to nothing. However, making things available for free on the Internet is probably a lot closer to the original ideas of freely sharing scientific and scholarly knowledge. So, I will give it a shot and see how it goes.

I am looking forward to 2010 how ever you pronounce it and will come back at the end of the year and reflect on whether or not it met my expectations.

Ah, Break!!

I am finished with my grading and have submitted my grades electronically. So the Fall 2009 semester is officially over for me and I am officially on break. Normal people who have real jobs sometimes look at academics who get three or four weeks off for winter break and think "what a chushy job!!" And, I have to admit, the job does have its cushy aspects. But, it isn't as though I have three or four weeks to lay on the couch and watch daytime TV. I have work to do.

Each semester break I go over my classes for the next semester to revise and improve them. Sometimes this is fairly easy and sometimes it is a huge amount of work. You would think that once you have delivered a class, the work is done. But that is not true. In some classes the technology changes. In other classes you look over what you did the prior semester and try to fix pieces that didn't work very well. Not only does the material change, the students continually change as well. So, you are often organizing one moving target for delivery to another moving target.

In other classes you just add new material to keep the class interesting to teach. For example, in my class Writing Stories to Explore the Ethics of Technology, I am thinking about introducing a collaborative writing assignment using a Wiki. So, I have to come up to speed on Wiki technology and work out the mechanical aspects of grading a collaborative project.

If you have been following my posts, you know that I have been carrying on recently about a new age of mass collaboration. This very large idea translates into a very concrete idea in this collaborative assignment. And this is the way things are supposed to be. You think big thoughts and then explore them in little ways. So break is not just time off. It is time to reflect, revise and hopefully improve.