All change – mind the gap

I’m no different to anyone else – I don’t like change. Well not the sort that happened to me today. Very nearly first thing today I had to leave my dear manager behind and change my allegiances. Sad but exciting at the same time – what new things will I encounter, how might it change the way I work? Of course no job is perfect but let’s hope there will be more good than iffy that comes out of the new arrangement. I was quite discombobulated for a while. So it’s been an odd day – I was very good and started writing PIDs then realised I didn’t have the necessary Strategic Plan I needed to link to. It just went on like that, falling from one job to another all day. I now feel annoyed that I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to when I arrived this morning. I couldn’t even get to grips properly with Twitter.

I read an article from Scientific American called, “The Perils of Copy Protection“. It seemed to be agreeing to some extent with something I said on my other blog about how the Copyright Laws seemed to be making us all into criminals. I feel like yelling,”please can we get to the bottom of this pit so we can start climbing up again”.

I thought I’d cheer myself up and go back to a post by Martin Hawksey from June. For some reason this post seems to make me feel better, may be because it is about looking forward or because, on the whole, it’s about successful Academic Uses of Social Media. As Martin says, there is this niggling feeling that, despite all the good stuff, universities are just not going to be able to keep up with the pace of change. I don’t know that I really believe that, especially after attending the 5th Bloomsbury Conference on epublishing (see previous blogs for urls). However, I do believe there will be those universities that “get it” and start changing the way they practice. Improving the Digital Literacy skills of both students and all staff so they are able to take advantage of any new change in technology that comes along. Those that intend to try following in the slip-stream are going to find there is no lift to their wings any more – they will crash and burn.

I hope I feel better tomorrow, I really hate this disjointed feeling – it’s like having an itch you can’t scratch.