There have been many things on my mind lately, and I've not had the discipline in place to make them flow together coherently. The "bookmarks" I have saved on my del.icio.us account gives some indication of what I've been pondering, but by no means, a complete picture. One thing is for sure: all this distraction has pushed my blogging to the side. Today, I will get back on my blogging podiums to write about both the personal side and the work side of what I've been up to.
On the personal side:
As I jumped in wondering what I should actually write about, I felt instantly pulled in too many directions. Fortunately, I was reminded of the central lessons of the last weeks: that I should start in a place of great stillness, which also happens to be a place of great depth. As I hold myself still, I am able to accept that I am a little human being living in a world with outsized needs, including my own. I remember the pledge I had made to pray for Darfur, and I pause to do so. We put up a display to raise awareness about Darfur at First Pres Berkeley and will host a postcard writing event for A Million Voices for Darfur in early April. I am relieved that spring break is coming up, primarily because it gives my students and me some breathing room for the course.
The absence of activity on my electronic presences belies the churn of words on my computer. Having just read about super-prolific Stephen Downe's recently announced hiatus from blogging to take time to stop and reflect made me wonder whether I'm going in the wrong direction by trying to get back into blogging.
The situations are certainly not parallel. First, I've never been the regular and prolific blogger that Stephen was. I have had lots of time to reflect, though I can stand for more in this time of change, challenge, and opportunity. Most importantly, I believe that regular weblogging would be an excellent discipline for me since it would force me to work in smaller chunks, to begin and to complete manageable pieces of work on a regular basis. Without forcing myself to write coherent sentences and paragraphs, I will generate monstrous lists of suggestive phrases. Writers understand the seductiveness of such lists, which seem to contain more content than they actually do.
On the work side:
There is a huge amount of change afoot in my workplace and in my own professional career. Although it would be inappropriate for me to write about some of these matters, I can certainly write openly about my personal vision for information technology at UC Berkeley and beyond. This is an opportune moment to rethink every aspect of my professional work as I look at the field at large and the challenges, opportunities, and risks before me specifically. The product of my (over?) cogitation has been long EccoPro outlines with phrases such as remix, interoperability, gather/create/share, grids, bibliographic metadata, knowledge repository, seamlessness. My job now is to write these outlines in little essays that make sense to others. time to step back to ponder what we do to best serve the academic and research needs of the campus.
Posted by rdhyee at March 26, 2006 08:22 AM