On being an administrator and being academically-minded

I used to think that the academic life wasn't for me. I used to think that hiding away in an office, reading, "researching" (whatever that meant to me), and writing would be so limiting. I wanted to be out doing stuff. Managing projects, developing policy, promoting innovation, managing people(!), and generally rationalising and putting into practice all those crazy ideas academics came up with.

I've changed my thinking a little since taking on this new role at Bond. While I still want to be on the "doing" side of the fence, I would very much like to pursue a bit of academic-style "thinking" more than I'm currently able to do. The thought of hiding away for a few weeks or months to fully develop an original and innovative idea, and then bring it out into the world to actually try it out really appeals to me. To those people who know me well, I know this will come as a shock, but I want to be able to shut out the operational and strategic world I work in and have the opportunity to really think things through.

I wonder if there's a place in higher education for administrators with academic tendencies, or are we too rare a breed to be catered for?

Where things are at

Wow. A whole month between posts. Must not do that again. So it's Week 6 of the May semester, with 30 some odd academic staff running strong with Blackboard.

I had a great meeting last week with one of the academics who had been a touch resistant and unsure at the start of semester. She had asked my advice on how to encourage her students to engage with the discussion board in preparation for their week 8 tutorial, which will be replaced by postings on a discussion board. I worked with her to refine and communicate to her students her expectations of them in terms of post number, length etc. I wanted to stress to her the importance of giving them a framework to work within and to clearly define the outcomes she wanted them to achieve. Will report back in a couple weeks on how it went.

Speaking of frameworks and clearly defined outcomes, I'll be facilitated a planning morning next week to start to develop these things in relation to my division, Teaching & Learning Services. I've been struggling with the post-project direction of the unit and want to start to map out the services we will be providing to the university and the initiatives we will be responsible for. Not an easy task in Bond's decentralised environment.

There are also happenings afoot in relation to developing a university-wide ICT strategy that will form the framework for communication, governance, funding, learning spaces, service delivery, training and development etc. Oh, and guess who has been asked to be a member of the 5-person working party to develop the strategic framework? Yup. That'd be me. I've thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to such a critical and defining piece of work, but wow. It's a big task.

I'm also involved in two initiatives related to academic staff development. One is to improve basic and general information literacy and ICT skills, which the other is focusing on teaching skills with the view to build towards to a grad cert in higher education or similar.

To round it all out, I'm now gearing up for the second phase of the Blackboard implementation, which involves the full roll-out for use by all subjects. The will involve another level of integration with source data systems as well as a massive staff development effort.

I'm describing all this so I can look back and remember just how varied my role here has been. While the variation keeps things interested, it can be a bit of a stretch to switch between modes. I think my brain is developing flexibility in muscles it never knew it had.