There has got to be some irony in a scholarship of pedagogy symposium leaving me too tired to plan lessons.
My position, while certainly focused on technology, does require (and I enjoy) some amount of instruction. If nothing else, we don’t have enough staff to not have everyone pitch in for instruction. I will also be teaching a liberal arts seminar in the spring, which will explore how technological innovations throughout time have affected work and leisure. The seminars emphasize integrative learning across the disciplines, which is ideal for a “generalist” who often feels jack of all trades, master of none.
For me instruction provides a forum in which I can understand how technology decisions I make for the library actually affect the people who use it for their academic lives. I don’t think I could do my job half as well if I didn’t have to spend a lot of time working with the library’s resources to perform non-theoretical activities.
In a related vein, I was able to finally get some real world help with the website redesign process. Today my boss rounded up some student workers to come help out with website brainstorming, and it was just as helpful as I hoped it would be. They came up with some great non-librarian ideas, and completely shot down some “innovative” ideas I’d read on library technology blogs.
I seem to be lacking a cohesive theme and/or unity in this, but let’s just take it as given that I am tired, work too many hours, but love what I do.