I decided to track myself for a couple hours to see if I can connect the various activities I do in an average day. Here goes…
My initial plan was to review some proposals within the Teacher Education Group for the 2009 AECT conference. For anyone who is going into academia, I highly recommend signing up to review proposals. A good way to understand what reviewers are looking for is to be one. As I login to the AECT site I realize that they have a jobs section. My MIT job ends in 4 months, so I decide to take a quick detour and post my resume. But rather than allowing me to post my newly polished resume as a PDF, the AECT site asks me for all the same information, piece by piece, in little forms. So I do some quick copying and pasting. Except it asks me to fill in the number of employees at each company I’ve worked for. Grr… How many employees are at MIT? Google search. How many employees at Utah State University? Google search. How about Redlands Unified School District? Another Google search. And at the end (step 5 of 6) it asks me for a goal statement. GRRR… I don’t have time for this. No one is ever going to look for my resume on AECT.org anyway… Wait! I did on of those when I filled out my LinkedIn profile. Copy… paste… done. After about 30 minutes I go back to reading proposal #1. Just then, my boss at Notre Dame instant messages me with a question about a session for an upcoming conference. But someone else messages her and, poof, she’s gone. Then I get another IM from someone. Then my wife calls me back. Another 30 minutes later I’m back to reviewing proposal #1. It is unclear and poorly written, and I think I did the AECT attendees a favor by rejecting it. As I start on the second proposal, I see a tweet from Doug Holton to Andy Carvin on Apple in education. I’m curious to see that two seemingly unrelated twits I follow on Twitter know eachother, so I click the link. The site is call themacsucks.com, and makes the claim that macs are too expensive for tight education budgets. I agree, but it’s an oversimplification, so I take the bait and add a quick comment. Then I realize that for all it’s posts, themacsucks.com has a pagerank of zero. So I am basically commenting to myself and one other guy who admits he is not an educator. It’s been an hour and a half, and once again I’m reading AECT proposal #2.
Some would say that I am easily distracted. I prefer to call it “flexible.” This is what most days are like as I work on my PhD, my job, and everything in between.