Years ago, I started a blog that I called at professorjoosten.blogpost.org . It was just that, a collection of thoughts, and then some. When I started the blog, as with everything, I was testing out how do blogging, use this somewhat new tool by Google, blogspot, and think about how I could use it in my organizations and communication tech courses. In the beginning, like with Twitter microblogging or wikispaces, I was mainly just writing notes to myeslf that were public in the nature of the medium or tech. My reflections of a conferences or resources I had gathered, and later I would use it as a quick place to share out resources to others. I could post it up quick and send them a public link while avoiding the walled gardens of our university systems, uneccesary hurdles – user authentication, privacy and permission settings.
I soon found this unintended consquence of open which I talk about in my book on social media – your public online communication and content helps others. Often, the information I would post online – my ideas, insights, reflections, rants, and work products – would result in helping others advance their work at their own univeristies, in their learning centers or in their classrooms. It also would create a sence of professional and relational intimiacy at times – people would develop a connection or warmth with me realizing that they were not alone, there were others doing similar work, and individuals that had similar attitudes, opnions, and beliefes about tech, learning, humans, behaviors, and institutions. As time went on, I wrote about things I was working on, things I was reading, research I was conducting, more resources I wanted to share, and ideas and questions that I was trying to work through. Some posts were more developed than others. Some were really just notes and resources that I thought might be useful to someone else (or that I wanted to be able to find again myself).
Recently, I went back and started reading through some of it. There is a lot there! There is work on planning the future of education and work, strategic planning, process design, technology and learning, institutional change and innovation, humans, equity, and data, communication and media theories, structuration of technology, research methods and epistemologies, and assessment and measurement. There are also reading lists, conference reflections, resources, unfinished ideas, and a few things that I am not quite sure why I posted. It really was a collection of thoughts, some spur of the moment and some almost a place holder for something more nuanced or just for me to remember.
My work, like the lives and work of so many others, has gone through considerable change in the years since the pandemic. I find myself now at something of an inflection point, asking a deceptively simple question, where to from here?
When the pandemic began, my work was suddenly in extraordinary demand. As someone whose career had focused on digital learning, technology, innovation, and organizational change, I found myself working almost continuously. Nationally and within my university, there was an urgency to the work that I had never experienced before. I think I did little other than work, interrupted occasionally by a hike that provided a break from the intensity of it all. And then, with something approaching the same swiftness with which the pandemic had entered my life, the institution where I had spent more than twenty years of my career began to feel like a different place. Colleagues with whom I had built programs, research, ideas, and institutional knowledge retired or left for other opportunities. Structures changed. Relationships changed. Work changed. The routines and relationships through which I had understood not only how to accomplish my work, but also my place within the organization, became less certain.
Anthony Giddens (1984) gave us structuration theory and a language for understanding some of what I now find myself experiencing. Through the routinization of everyday life, we establish continuity and a degree of predictability in our relationships with one another and with the social systems we inhabit. These routines contribute to ontological security, a fundamental sense of continuity, order, and confidence in the social world and our place within it. But, when much of that continuity disappears, you get a disruption of ontological security. The structures, relationships, routines, and people that made my professional world intelligible have changed substantially. And perhaps appropriately, my response has to start looking backward, reflexive monitoring.
I am revisiting experience, constructing plausible accounts of what has occurred. I have returned to old research, projects, presentations, websites, and even an old blog. I am rediscovering ideas I had forgotten, questions that still interest me, and work that remains surprisingly relevant. I am also trying to preserve something less tangible — the tacit and implicit knowledge of my colleagues, this institution, and myself, accumulated through more than twenty years of shared work. Something that I have harped about since the day I arrived as we watched so much of it walk out the door. An unfathomable amount of what we know about organizations is never fully documented. It resides in people, relationships, routines, stories, and practices developed over years of effort, experimentation, successes, failures, and, yes, some blood, sweat, and tears.
In returning to my earlier work, then, I am not simply trying to reconstruct what I did. I am trying to understand the trajectory. What persisted? What changed? What did I learn? What do I still believe? What questions continue to compel me?
And, ultimately: What do I want to do with all of it now?
Perhaps that is what this return to writing is about. It is an act of reflexive monitoring and sensemaking in response to disruption, but also an effort to recover and reconstruct agency. I am revisiting where I have been not because I want to return there, but because understanding the path behind me may illuminate the possibilities ahead. After years spent studying how people and organizations encounter technology, innovation, disruption, and change, I now find myself confronting those same questions from a different position.
This time, I am not only studying the change. I am living inside it. And I am curious to discover where it leads.
So, where to from here?
I decided earlier this year to write a book that would illustrated our work in innovation pilot projects, faculty development, learning technologies, online and blended learning, digital learning research, and more. The book is one of two that I am working on right now. The other book is more of a personal memoire and life giving. Both will be great capstones to the end of an era as I just drop my only daughter off at college and plan for my departure from the university shortly.