Recently in Weekly Reflections Category

I've also been trying to get a lot of the smaller pending projects off of my plate - ordering shirts for Educational Gaming Commons, creating support posters for the Digital Commons locations at the campuses, and working up some generic Penn State screen savers for the machines in the computer labs. I got the first two done and have been making headway on the third. Then I can concentrate on doing signs and more promotional materials for EGC as that space gets built over in Findlay.

I had an interesting conversation with Jamie Oberdick regarding revamping the TLT Talks. We have been wanting to get these back up and running, but we also want to expand them to get an audience outside of TLT. We were discussing how April is going to be our "Symposium month" on the TLT site. Essentially, every day's posted content will be related to our Symposium in some way. That led to us thinking that it would be great to have Jeff Swain give a talk at the end of March that would be about the Symposium. I remembered something that Jamie was doing in the previous version of the TLT newsletter that he called "7 Questions" where he would interview a staff member and ask them seven questions that would then be included in the newsletter in podcast form. So I was thinking that perhaps we could spotlight Jeff on the TLT site at the beginning of the month. We would give a little demographic info on him, but the spotlight would mostly be that he is the chair of this year's Symposium and include some info about the event. The spotlight on Jeff would also include a notice that he would be giving a TLT Talk at the end of the month regarding the Symposium. We could have people be able to sign up to attend the TLT Talk through the site, so we would know going in how many people are planning to come. We need to iron out some details, but this could work very nicely.

We've also sent out the general registration announcement for the Symposium, and Jeff and I have already received several phone calls and emails from faculty inquiring about the event. The announcement will hit the all-campus Faculty/Staff newswire on Penn State Live this Thursday, so I expect a surge in registration soon after. As of 1/30, I believe we had about 160 people registered. That doesn't include the 4 or 5 of us who are listed as "instructors" and can't register on SemReg. We had a record number of proposal submissions this year, and I wouldn't be surprised in the least if we also have a record number of registrants.

The Symposium print campaign is trying something new. Last year we made posters of our "faculty profiles" photos. These were mounted and laminated on foam board and then hung out in the hallway between the 210 and 202 side of Rider Building. The tools at my disposal for hanging the posters was very low-tech... thumb tacks. I tried to use clear ones so that they wouldn't show up as easily, but when I ran out of clear ones I had to resort to white ones (the wall was white so I figured they would blend in). Suffice it to say that while it didn't look horrible, it didn't quite pull off that professional look I was going for. So as we start to make posters for the print portion of this year's marketing campaign, we are running into the same issue. Dave made 4 very sharp posters that he had mounted on board and laminated, but he was struggling with how to hang them on the wall. If there is one thing I have learned about Dave is that he is incredibly resourceful. He found something on the internet called Wallhogs. Wallhogs are large posters than can be printed on vinyl and attached to a wall using something called Photo-Tex that, in the words of Wallhogs themselves, is a "reusable adhesive backing that can be used indoor or outdoor on nearly any surface." These are very similar to Fatheads, which I have seen advertised on TV. So we ordered one to try it out, and it should be here tomorrow or Wednesday.

Speaking of Dave, this leads me to something that I didn't expect to happen when I started doing these weekly reflections. I subscribe to many of my co-workers' blogs, and I read many of their posts, but I have hardly ever commented. However, now that most of the staff are writing weekly reflections, I find myself not only commenting on those posts, but on many of their other posts as well. Dave is one person whose blog I have commented on frequently in the last week. I didn't expect that to happen because I have a hard enough time writing posts to my own blog. Not because I don't want to, but because I don't find it easy. I started this particular post on Friday, 1/23, but it won't get posted until Monday, 1/26 because I keep going back and rewriting it. I can't help it. I know people have told me to treat writing a blog as a stream of consciousness type of thing, but I just can't do it. At least not yet. So it takes me forever to write a post.

So I say to myself that I should just write one post a week for now, and that it'll be no big deal. Heck, I really should be able to get 4 or 5 written. Yet here I am with just the one post. But something is happening. Even though I have only written one post a week on my own blog, I am doing more writing in general because I am really getting into reading and commenting on my co-workers' spaces. Oh, I'll spend more time than I should writing and rewriting my comments, but I'm writing. And it is inspiring me to write more and share my ideas. I am still daunted by the fact that I can't just write what I am thinking at the moment and let it go; that I have to go back and analyze it and go over it again and again. However, I really find it gratifying to comment to my co-workers, and my hope is to have them comment to me. I just hope they find what I have to say as interesting as I find their stuff.