Suddenly, and seemingly without warning, I find myself in my last official week as a professor. My time as a visiting professor is coming to a close — though you wouldn’t guess it looking at my desk, and the long list of students I have to meet with.
Honestly I’m too busy right now to really adjust to the idea that this is almost over. More to come on all of this.
It’s difficult for me to believe that we just finished week 6 at RIT. This has been the most intense quarter yet. In part that’s because it’s my last. Teaching one class for only the second time has contributed as well. But most of that time has been taken up trying to come up with ways to bring sustainable change to the School of Print.
Coming up with ideas has not been hard. It’s the doing and nurturing parts that take all the time.
One effort we’ve undertaken is to start a blog for the School. SPMEtcetera soft-launched earlier in the quarter. Our hope is to create a destination where the industry, alumni, and prospective and current students can discover all the neat things that are going on at SPM. The great part, from a sustainability perspective, is that all the writing is being done by student employees. We’ll make an official announcement about the blog later this week.
The other big project is the Open Publishing Lab. There will be a lot more about that soon. The good news is that over two years of planning will (hopefully) be coming to fruition in less than 14 days. We just need our teams to make it to May 3 and the innovation festival and then we’ll have a lot to talk about and show.
Sorry about that everyone. Sometimes I’m such a noob.
In my e-mail que this morning was an invite to reunion.com. It had been sent to me by an business associate. Being the Social Networking patsy that I am, I decided to go through the joining process. After registering, and avoiding the pay-to-play options, the website volunteered to search through it’s member database to see if any of my friends were already members. All I had to do was let it look at my g-mail address list. This seemed like a good idea at the time to my sleepy brain.
*sigh*
I unfortunately missed this little clause:
We’ll find your friends and family who are already members and also automatically invite any non-members to join (it’s free!).
I just failed the internet.
I also have a feeling that this “helpful feature” is going to create a lot of problems for reunion.com.
Update: as I expected the e-mails are beginning to flow into my inbox from folks who received the spam…
Julian Dibbell is going to be speaking at RIT this Wednesday. Julian, an associate editor at Wired, is an awesome guy and someone whose been involved in, and writing about, cyberculture for years. His latest work, Play Money, is an exploration of the various economic systems that have developed in various virtual spaces. At RIT he’ll be speaking on “Ludocapitalism – A few ways of making real money from a virtual economy, and what they mean.”
I first met while at the University of Chicago. Julian’s input was really helpful for me while writing my thesis. We touched base again late last year at the American Anthropological Association Conference. Again, I got a lot out of the conversation. So if you’ve got the chance, come out and hear him speak.
Here are the official details:
I’ve been testing the new WordPress interface for a while and just think it’s da bombiest! The user interface is clean, the new functions rock, and the .php seems pretty optimized (everything running faster, even on my slow server).
It’s amazing to think that I’m already done with the first three weeks of my final quarter at RIT. It’s been intense — and the reason that I’ve not been blogging. By the end of this coming week, I’ll be able to premier all the stuff that I’ve been working on.