Wow. What a day!

The best part of the day was that I wrote an internal grant proposal to get fifteen of those cool little Aiptek cameras - and Compact Flash cards & card readers - for use in the writing program here. (They're now peddling the Aiptek DV-4500, which encodes movies using MPEG-4 format, which is wa-aaaaaaaay cool because MPEG-4 is so much more cross-platformic than .AVI.)

So in order to do this, I first talked to the Writing Program Lead Faculty, who thought it sounded interesting, and that he might use the cameras. He suggested that I talk to the department Technology Goddess, which was a very welcome idea: I've been trying to find a way to approach her in some non-threatening way since I got here. (She hasn't exactly gone out of her way to make contact with me. Indulge me in a moment of self-aggrandisement: I fancy that she's possibly been feeling a bit threatened by me.) So I asked her if she'd be interested in using the cameras, and she was very enthused.

I approached a couple of other faculty members, and also got the proposal on the agenda at tomorrow's writing committee meeting.

Then I talked to the department chair. (Writing is in the Communication department.) Primarily I was asking him if he'd commit to helping us find a distribution mechanism for these cameras . . . but it was also a good way to let him know what I'm up to; he, too, was enthused.

So basically, I managed to get buy-in from lots of people for my pet project, and write the proposal (only a 2-pager; I hadda widen the margins and shrink the font). I really like the fact that collaboration is so important here - and the fact that all the talk surrounding portfolios makes it just generally easy to talk to colleagues.

So I whistled my way back from the printer, draft proposal in hand, and dropped it off on the Department Chair's desk.

And then it hit me: I've been here exactly six weeks. It took me a scant six weeks to find a way to start the ball rolling on My Pet Interest - the intersection of multimedia and print literacy. Before I got here, I was telling myself that I'd just have to content myself with the status quo, at least for this year, because I really need to find my way and learn the ropes. And I'm doing that . . . but apparently, also, almost without realizing it, I'm starting to investigate that other concern already . . . This is why I so desperately wanted to be teaching again - so I could do pedagogical research, as it were. And lo and behold, I am.

The day started off by putting me in the right frame of mind for all this, too. I had coffee with my friend Kim, who's a media person at the UM College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters, and who was previously part of the Media Union (and all its incarnations), and before that, part of the much-beloved Office of Instructional Technology. She's really happy in her current job, which makes me happy - but it also made me happy I'm doing what I'm doing, because in the course of our conversation, she reminded me of nearly everythng that made me crazy. Like, the Deans have all the power at UM, which makes cross-campus initiatives extremely hard to sustain. And technology efforts have to be driven by faculty; in my previous role, all the innovation I could muster had to have faculty endorsement. Which is as it should be; I'm not saying otherwise. But I did find it extremely frustrating to be constantly thinking up cool things and not be able to do much about them.

And then, at lunchtime at This CC, there was a person from the UM College of Pharmacy recruiting TCC students at a table just about outside my office door. I was very happy to see Valener, and she was happy to see me . . . She said they miss me, which was kind of her to say . . . but nonetheless, I still felt happy to be where I am.

And then, Merck pulled Vioxx off the market, which was a Big Story on NPR. It was nice to be able to chuckle maliciously without a shred of cognitive dissonance! As much as I liked my colleagues and as much as I enjoyed the work, it was kinda hard to feel, truly and deeply, that I was Doing Good in the World at the College of Pharmacy. Believe me, at TCC that's not a problem!!