Week Two Exhale

It is hard to believe that as I write this post that we are ending the second week of classes for the winter term. I have been sorely remiss in posting here since my last post was right before the new year. 

Of course the beginning of term, or start-up as we call it in my faculty, is always a flurry of activity and a panoply of challenges.  It is a time of last minute registrations, classroom space being finalized, long conversations with the bookstore about when textbooks will arrive.  It is also time to perform last minute changes to syllabi. If like me you are teaching two new subjects this term, it is also time for lesson prep. 

The end of the second week of classes is usually when the hustle and bustle has calmed. You know your students a bit better, you gain the flow in your teaching and prep.  This weekend is what I like to call the “week two exhale.” This little pun is truly what happens for me at the end of week two. I realize I have been holding my breath for about 14 days and I finally breathe again. 

It is a time when things fall into place and that all your best laid time management skills in order to maintain a productive and happy semester are put to the test. For me the test this semester will be to make sure to stay dedicated to the time I have blocked off for my monograph typescript edits. I am already very excited about the courses I am teaching this semester and I am looking forward to weeks of collaborative learning and insightful discussion. It is when the larger daily things on your productivity plate are working well that dedicating time to other projects becomes easier. 

I made a promise to myself to be a bit more active than sedentary this term and the exercise time is actually productive for it allows me to reflect and have time away to see things in a different light.  It has allowed me for the past week or so to be immersed in thoughts about Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). I am giving my insight on SMEs for a project at the college and I spent time curating resources that I thought would be valuable for informational purposes.  I compiled them in a Evernote notebook here: https://www.evernote.com/pub/anngagne/forsme. It is a very preliminary resource but it reminded me of the importance of curation and managing resources efficiently. If you do not manage these resources efficiently you end up making more work for yourself instead of making things easier. You give yourself less time to exhale.

Whenever I lapse in my Evernote clipping (usually I clip things I favorite on Twitter and then tag them appropriately) I swear up and down that I will never do it again. This is all about time management. We all have so much to do as academics, and so much we want to do, sometimes it is the small things like keeping up with blogging or your Evernote notebooks that make all the difference. 

And this leads to my final “week two exhale” thought. I really would like to thank @AlisonSeaman who put the bug about PLNs (Personal Learning  Networks) (by @TomWhitby article here) and  PKMs (Personal Knowledge Management)(see the excellent article by @hjarche here) in my ear this week.  Much of this blog deals with pedagogy and pedagogical strategies for it truly does relate to my research in the ethics of tactility in Victorian literature (the tactile and ethical both being arguably essential in the pedagogical). When my Twitter alights with ideas I know that I have a really good PLN. The time I took to reflect and compile resources for SMEs was really about PKM. How do I effectively and efficiently manage knowledge? How do I personalize my “sense-making” and not drown in information? These are important questions we must ask ourselves. 

In conclusion I would like to invite you to follow my very good friend Sarah Creel’s Twitter @WritingHaywood. She is doing some excellent textual work on Eliza Haywood and she would be a nice addition to your PLNs!

I hope you all have a great semester and remember to breathe!