This semester I’m officially on sabbatical leave from my faculty position at West Chester University. I’m supposed to be spending my time working on my sabbatical project, and that’s what I’ve been doing…at least part of the time. But during the first two weeks of this semester, I’ve found myself responding to a lot of situations at school that aren’t directly related to my sabbatical project.
For example, last week I spent quite a bit of time helping faculty colleagues with their computers. One of my colleagues had a computer that wouldn’t boot on the first day of class. A few had problems connecting to our departmental server. And there were a host of small issues that I was called upon for advice.
Not that I’m complaining. I appreciate being useful, and it gave me an excuse to keep in touch with my colleagues. But it was making me wonder if I was really on sabbatical…or just “sort of” on sabbatical.
This week I’m happy to say I’m making more progress on my sabbatical project. I’m hopeful that by the end of the year, I’ll see some tangible results. Much of the work I’m doing will be coordinated with our departmental intranet, which I’ve recently developed at communication.wcupa.edu/myCOM. I’m building myCOM using the open-source learning content management software Moodle, which I’ve used in the past for maintaining course web sites on our departmental web server. Eventually, however, I would like to have the content I’m creating integrated into an iTunes U site, something that West Chester University was supposed to have launched a year ago.