There’s something in the air right now – something electrifying. It’s conference time. The season when I witness the ceaseless banter of folks like Scott Leslie, Jim Groom, Alan Levine, Brian Lamb and a host of inimitable North American characters flooding the Twitter airwaves like a tidal wave.
It’s amazingly entertaining to watch, and yet something about it often makes me pensive. It’s the feeling that I’m missing out on the excitement, the creative energy, the showmanship, the passion and the fun – missing out on the incredible aire of enthusiastic jubilation that makes for an incredible collaborative learning environment.
Sometimes I feel left out, an outsider on the periphery; looking through the window from the outside in. Perhaps even start to feel less positive about where I am, or where my university is at. As if we’ve missed the boat, or haven’t managed to build our own yet.
But that’s not what all this is about. It’s not about being the next Jim Groom or the next New Media Consortium; it’s not about matching pace or being ahead of the pack. It’s about carving your own niche, exploring your own path, and being a little bit better, more capable, or more creative than you were yesterday. It’s about comparing each of us to ourselves – to where we are, where we’ve been and where we’re going – not to where other people are.
It’s about supporting the teacher who wants to learn PowerPoint because he’s always used overhead projectors and wants to try something new and "enter the 21st century" as an instructor said to me today. It’s about recognising where others are at in their journey and helping them along a little further towards where they want to go, not necessarily where I want them to.
I’m incredibly grateful to the amazing buch of people I mentioned at the begining of this post. I am truly better off for watching them work. Yet that doesn’t make what we’re doing on the opposite side of the globe is any less significant. It’s all relative.
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Recent Comments
I tend to feel the same way about Canada, like I’m always south of what’s going on!
I also notice that all these folks have cool ed tech jobs, while I’m “just” a history professor. At a community college, no less.
But as you say, it isn’t about comparing fabulous jobs. It’s about finding a way to integrate the cool stuff into my job, stretching the dimensions of what my job is supposed to be, creating stuff that wasn’t there before but that people (in my case, students and fellow faculty) didn’t even know they needed.
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