So one of the things that didn’t come up in the year I haven’t been posting here is the big work stuff. Still at Harvard, hit my 5 year anniversary back in January. As a part of being here, I’ve picked up a huge chunk of curriculum management stuff. Definitely not in the usual domain for an Instructional Technologist, but when the staff is this small, there’s always another hat to wear.
The net of this, and of being right under the Associate Dean for Education, is that for more than two years I was working on the school’s re-accreditation efforts. All of that culminated in the site visit in mid-October. For 2+ years a large part of my time was spent collecting data, making reports, holding meetings, contributing narratives to our thousands of pages of submitted materials, pulling together numerical truths from disparate systems, analyzing the state of reality and articulating it, and developing deep expertise on esoteric administrivia.
And it led to three intense and very long days (hey, did you know they kick you out of the library at midnight, even when it’s really important stuff?), producing answers to questions even if they were already answered. Explaining choices made and justifying approaches taken. And just when I thought the worst was over, there came a looming cloud over the horizon. But with a bunch of people all rowing in the same direction (this is where the library closing at midnight happened), we refuted every challenge and made it through.
This was a long time in the making, and I suspect it will still be a long time yet before I fully relax.