Take a deep breath: we're about to plunge back in.

It's mid-August, when a young academic's fancy turns to thoughts of ...

THE FALL SEMESTER.

In my day-job capacity in my college's Center for Academic Technology, I've been here all summer, supporting various programs around campus, from new student orientation to summer sessions to the LEAD Academy. But life gets quite a bit busier as my faculty colleagues start heading back to campus (mentally and physically), prepping for the start of the next academic cycle.

For the first time in quite a while, I myself won't be teaching in Fall 2013 (the seminar I was hoping to do didn't look like it would attract enough registration), so there's a fairly large chunk of time and attention I can now divert to my tech-side work with faculty, particularly in effective use of Canvas for online course support. There've been a large number of changes since people logged out of their courses in May, and one of my major goals is to encourage everyone to pay attention to the changes, rather than assuming things are the same as last year.

(By the way, that's a hard habit to break, since our last LMS notoriously didn't "do" updates, except maybe once per year. People are not yet fully used to the idea of dynamic [dare I use the buzzword "nimble"?] SaaS. Updates and fixes every three weeks? Unheard of! Absurd!)

Another work goal I have for myself is to work more closely with our campus's Freel Library. Our Digital Services librarian Pamela has been doing fantastic work developing and promoting resources at Freel, and I want to do my part to help. It helps that our respective resource-sets naturally overlap, and we have, in fact, already done some mutually-supporting development in the past year. "More of that" is the watchword. Watch-phrase. Whatever.

Anyway, I've got some fun projects in the planning stage too. One involves organizing a campus screening of the brand-new documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply; another is a panel discussion about Henrietta Lacks, hooking in to the college's First-Year Experience reading of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; another is, of course, my ongoing work with Dungeons & Discourse.

In closing, a goofy video I made this past weekend for our faculty, and which caused a little spike in my Twitter traffic yesterday...