Pop Academy

Shame on me. I went more than a month without a post. In my defense, I did spend much of February researching and writing toward my social media pedagogy essay. I still have about 10 days to the deadline for the special journal call I’m working toward. Scrolling through the stacks of my university library, but especially Old Dominion University’s library (which is closer to my neighborhood) brought back amazing #commnerd memories from undergrad and grad school. As much as technology seems to rule my life, the smell of books, old and new, reminds me of the importance of the craft I’ve chosen. Even as more of our research publications are shifted online, or at least accessed via journal databases on a screen, I appreciate the knowledge that I know is collected and cataloged as important works for future #commnerds like myself.

As I’ve referenced the Twitter hashtag #commnerd twice now, let me digress briefly to explain. My department has some AMAZING students that have created a network of social scholarship online. Many of them (you know who you are) tweet encouragement to their peers as they complete their rigorous, life-sucking senior seminar projects, as well as share helpful links and comments. Some also blog about their research experience. However, this online collaboration and reflection has not replaced their more traditional study sessions, only enhanced them. Somewhere along the way, the nickname Comm Nerd caught on and is now a Twitter list, hashtag AND t-shirt. These students rock! I could go on and on about the complexities of the millennials, as shared by my fellow academic bloggers and tweeps since the Pew Center released this and PBS aired Digital Nation. However, I don’t have anything spectacularly different or fresh to offer that hasn’t been addressed by said academics and public intellectuals. What I will say is that these students’ fantastic accomplishments are exhausting! I’m incredibly proud of them and confident they’ll do well in grad school and/or their respective careers. They’ve inspired me to get back to the writing board but it’s been a rough winter.

Teaching is the most rewarding job, yet it’s not a job you leave at the office. My office is also the library, the coffee shop, the interwebs and, especially, my home. I don’t often discuss my home life in my work life, but so much of my home life is consumed talking about my work life. Ouch, I think I sprained by brain on that one. Anyway, my home life that exists on Twitter and Facebook, while I do spend some of it connecting with family and grad school friends, is mostly spent reading links that incorporate my research and pedagogy interests. Hence, when the time comes to just sit down and write about these intersections, I’ve struggled to spend even more time at the computer being quantitatively productive. I use the word quantitatively not because I do empirical social science (because I don’t) but because research productivity for tenure and promotion is mostly concerned with quantifiable, verifiable publications. Sure, I am fortunate to work at a public liberal arts institution that values my teaching first, scholarship second. However, the scope of research and scholarship that I spend so much of my day cultivating via social media is a hybrid approach that I don’t think is quite recognizable as practical pedagogy and research.

And now we’ve come full circle. I’ve spent much of this semester mining through published essays and anthologies on pedagogy and digital/social media as well as feminist and queer theory to work toward publications that bring together my research agenda and pedagogical philosophy. I have half a Moleskin full of handwritten notes because I need to step away from the computer to be able to come back to it and actually be “productive” in the tenure-able capacity. The plan was to hit the writing hard this week during spring break. Instead, I did course prep, my taxes and other more manageable tasks that don’t require accelerated levels of emotional creativity. Why? Because I got a rescue puppy from a local shelter the first weekend of break. We’ve been talking about it for months but wanted to wait till we had time to train and get the pup acclimated to a new environment as best as possible. Since spring break affords that opportunity better than a regular work week, here we are. To others it may appear I’m stalling on the writing. Although this puppy has drained my energy, watching him sleep at my feet as I type this reminds me that there are other immeasurable means of productivity. We saved a puppy’s life. My work will get done. Just not this week.

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