I’ve spent most of my day today working on some materials about technological needs in the department I need to pass along to my department head (who in turn needs to pass it along to the dean and so forth). It’s been a committee effort, though I am more or less the lead person on this in the department. I will spare the details here, but I will note two things:
* Every time I make these lists, I realize how perpetually behind my department is in terms of the technological equipment readily available. Judging from what I know from folks out there in the computers and writing community, I’m not so sure that things here at EMU are really all that different than they are at a lot of comparable schools. Still, that doesn’t make it less frustrating.
* As Yogi Berra said, it’s deja vu all over again. Working on this stuff over the last couple of days with colleagues in the department has been satisfying in many ways, but a lot of what we’re asking for in this latest round of technology requests is pretty much the same sort of thing my colleagues and I have been asking for ever since I came to EMU in 1998. Again, probably not that unusual, but still frustrating.