It took a couple days to fill out my work journal again. Since my last post, I tried to complete “2 hours” of a Node.js online course in LinkedIn Learning. It took my a full 3 days to get through it. Part of the delay was that you have to stop the videos to do typing and debugging, so 2 hours is more like 4-6 hours. But still, with 3 days to kill you’d think I could knock it out in one morning. Nevertheless, inexplicably and yet predictably, I get interrupted with things to do every few minutes and I can’t often get around to the things I want to work on.
I had signed up for an online IS conference and so I watched some presentations. The presentations for non-teaching tracks were less exciting than I had hoped. One of the most memorable ones was some early research on using a bot (artificial intelligence) as a teammate (not just a class TA or tutor) in an online team for a class. Interesting idea, but in practice I still don’t understand how that would work in an IS class.
I don’t wish to complain, but the ticky-tack stuff (filling out forms, surveys, paperwork) of being an academic is maddening because it requires a lot of focus sometimes and chews up all your time. Case in point, this week I needed to sign a legal document related to a chapter for a book I wrote earlier this year. I literally had to do it three times, and each time it was super annoying. For the first time, I printed out the form, filled it out (since it needed a signature), then learned how to use my scanner at home (which is new), then sent it to the party that wanted it. They responded that a scanned version wouldn’t be acceptable. Using Adobe Acrobat Pro in its several varieties allows me to fill things out digitally, but I feel like I have lost days of my life over the last few years trying to get it to run on my mac. One day it works, another it doesn’t, then the license is expired, then the software is expired, etc. Therefore, my stomach churned at the idea of figuring out how to do this “simple” task. Fortunately, I remembered that there was an online platform at school that would possibly allow me to fill out the form online. So, I logged into the school service (which requires login after login and password after password), and then fought with the system for 20 or 30 minutes because I had to figure out how to upload a file and then edit it (there were multiple editing options). Finally, I got it all filled out, downloaded again to my mac, and sent out digitally. Then I got a response from the person I sent it to saying that I had filled out the wrong portion of the form. I had filled out the secondary author portion and not the primary portion (which was pre-filled with what logically seemed to be the logical first author). So finally, I went through the process again, this time learning how to integrate the online pdf service with my Box account so I could avoid uploading/downloading to a virtual computer in the cloud. So it’s weird, these things aren’t supposed to be hard, but like I say, they chew up a lot of time and there seems to be an infinite number of headaches like these that distract from the primary job and my interests.
Oh dang, I just realized I forgot to fill out a portion of the form where I include the title of my chapter. Great…..round 4, here I go.
Yesterday we had a school meeting called a town hall. It is basically a college-wide meeting that happens via Zoom. It takes an hour and happens regularly on Thursdays and it provides updates on things that affect us like COVID-rates, administrative policies that are being implemented, etc. Being a religious institution, it is nice that the Dean has some inspirational thoughts that she shares. On the other hand, as has been said by church leaders, it takes an amazing meeting to be better than no meeting, and for my personal preferences, I usually have a backlog of work to do that is a year’s long and I would prefer no meeting most of the time if I had a choice. Well, they say the meeting is optional, but over 150 people attend and it feels like every last employee in the college is there and so it doesn’t feel optional.
Since it is finals week, I also got several emails about grades that include things like: can I skip the final, or, what can I do to bring my grade up. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to research the what-if scenarios I get asked about. It’s all good though, there weren’t too many inquiries. Now I’m just waiting on a TA to finish grading the essay question included in the final exam and also some industry judges to finish ranking the student projects and then I can do the final grading for the class.
