Uncertainty

You know, a few weeks ago, I created a new blog post, and sort of announced that I was going to try and revive this blog. I have a list of post ideas that I was starting to flesh out: about the struggles of integrating OER into a curriculum that had not been open to it in the past, about the idea of the mission-driven organization, something about engagement with the community, and some other stuff. I was hoping that getting those up would inspire me to think about making this blog a more active space, engaging with other bloggers and the news of the day, as well as my own meanderings (see my Tweet about red being the one color without the concept of "light" or "dark": there's light blue and light green, but light red is called a different name: pink).

But being confined to a home office which really is not a home office (it's really the mostly-vacated bedroom of one of our older sons) changes the equation. The blog posts I planned seemed irrelevant, and I really don't have anything interesting to say about the new normal of self-quarantines and sheltering-in-place. I am worried about the future of my university and any smaller institution that already was wondering how to create something sustainable, but my worry isn't particularly interesting unless I actually have some ideas for addressing it, which I don't think I do just yet. I don't know of anyone else who is able to predict with certainty what the right course of action will be. I was a history instructor years ago, but I don't know of many history books that light the path to clarity. (Though the experience of the influenza pandemic of 1918 can be instructive, even though our medicine and our understanding of public health and our technology are different a century later.)

It's a full-on systems problem: the system is changing, which means it's not a question of simply getting my university more aligned with the world around us. That whole world is also struggling to re-align itself too, and we won't know for a while where things will settle, what lessons we will learn, how long it will last, what new subjects people will need to learn--nothing.

So I am going to hold off on academic blog posts for a bit. I am thinking of hosting a talk show as a kind of diversion: interviewing staff, faculty, alumni, fellow travelers about whatever they are doing to pass the time, and maybe asking them to consider how their area of expertise can be applied to the current situation. Or how it might change. Let me know if you are interested.