The Adventures of a Digital Sensei
Another year has gone by and another group of New Media graduates are ready to move on to the next stage of their journey. After 13 years of teaching this never gets old. My students are the absolute best part of the job.
To all of the New Media Technology graduates, past and present, congratulations! Your old professor is proud of each of you. Be bold and do big things, because I still have my eyes on you!
President Gail Mellow holds a publishing reception every year to acknowledge faculty at LaGuardia Community College for their academic and creative accomplishments. Once again I was happy to be counted among the scholars from the Humanities Department. The main article that I was being recognized for writing this year was one that was especially dear to me.
The peer reviewed article was highlighted in the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy on the need for the academe to expand the definition of scholarship include the contributions of faculty engaged in digital media. I had invested a fair amount of blood, sweat and tears in researching this article and it was a great feeling to have it pay off.
Finally got access to my new office at LaGuardia. I am not going to unpack because I have been told that both the New Media program and I will be moving to the Business and Technology department in the Fall. If the move goes through it will be my third department and fifth office in 8 years at the institution. Luckily I am master at musical chairs.
Still, I am hoping that I can convince the administration that moving the program yet again, and to another single department, would be a bad idea. All of the research that I did last year on the design and successful building of digital media programs points to the need for a truly cross disciplinary approach in this time of technological convergence. Placing programs in departmental silos runs counter to the natural intersection of traditional forms of communication, finance, and entertainment occurring as a result of the new high tech methods of delivery that have emerged in recent years. I guess only time will tell.
On the positive side, it is a really nice office.
I was recently part of a panel discussion at the 2013 CUNY Information Technology Conference on the academic uses of social media. The presentation included short introductions, followed by a roundtable discussion, in which the educators on the panel examined which social media practices they had employed over the years succeeded and failed.
I haven’t told many people but exactly two weeks ago I received news that my college has decided to award me tenure. I haven’t spoken much about it because I keep waiting for the feeling of elation that some of my colleagues who have gone through the same process have reported. But it hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t know if it will. For the most part I just feel numb.
I am not going to go into extensive detail about why I feel this way. I have already discussed some of my reasons through my research and my media appearances. Suffice it to say, it has been a long and difficult process. Several long years in fact, and it has been Continue reading “I feel numb”
Today I attended a presentation by Professor Kathleen Fitzpatrick on the role that open access and new forms of peer review will play on the future of scholarly communication. Professor Fitzpatrick is Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association (MLA) and Visiting Research Professor of English at New York University. She is the author of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. Her writings are among the most respected on the subject of scholarly transformation and were a great influence on my research into digital scholarship and the need to reform tenure and promotion standards for technology engaged faculty.
Every few months the academic directors at the CUNY School of Professional Studies (SPS) have a formal information session for potential students interested in our online degree programs. The purpose of these events are to introduce these potential students to our programs, our school, and to give them a taste of what will be expected of them if they decide to attend SPS. Well at the session last night while I was presenting I ran into a former New Media Technology student that I taught at LaGuardia many years ago. He is planning on going back to school to get a BA and is applying to the Communication and Media program that I am heading up.
I guess this is what they mean by full circle.
While I officially started last week at the CUNY – School of Professional Studies (SPS), this week was the kickoff of the 2013 Fall I session at LaGuardia. It was a very full day which included Opening Sessions, as well as programmatic and departmental meetings, technical consulting session, and student advisement. At the end of the afternoon I felt like I needed a juice box, my blankie, and a nap. I am hoping that this wasn’t going to be indicative on how the semester was going to unfold. Because just to clarify, despite some of my poorly worded previous posts, I haven’t left LaGuardia. My responsibilities have just shifted a tad.
As the sole full time instructor for the New Media, I didn’t want to abandon the program that I have helped build over the past 12 years. But Continue reading “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!”
Today was my first day at the new office. There is a ton of work that needs to be done and I am looking forward to getting underway. I have been asked to take charge of the Communication and Media program at the CUNY School of Professional Studies and to help redefine the degree in light of the recent technological and societal shifts brought forth by digital innovation.
I must say that it was kinda weird to be Continue reading “CUNY SPS – New Office Space”
I had been so busy toward the end of the semester that I had forgotten that a few months back I was interviewed on the curriculum changes that I had put in place for the LaGuardia New Media Technology program. Steve Zurier of the Community College Journal contacted me to see if I would be interested in talking to him about some of the emerging technologies impacting digital media programs.
It appears that he wanted to feature my comments under a section on media literacy in his article. I agreed to speak with him and discuss the challenges in developing a technology based curriculum to address the changing economic and educational shifts facing college students. Since I had given a fair amount of thought on the subject over the past year due to having to draft the Periodic Program Review (PPR) for the New Media major, I hoped the interview would be painless. Luckily it was straight forward like I assumed. I am quoted in the piece on my approach to digital media curriculum design.
A digital copy of the article can be found here.