I’ve been MIA for a couple of weeks here on the Internets … trying to buckle down and finish about a half dozen or so things in my real life. Throw in a wedding (my sister got married!) and you have a recipe for a lack of coherent internal dialogue. I am still rising from that funk to try and muster some items of interest … it hasn’t been easy. What I can do is point out that things are moving faster than I can ever remember — and I am talking about all things … my life, the life of my children, technology, projects, opportunities, work, and everything in between.

The speed isn’t the daunting part as much as the rapid change that it promotes. This fall, my daughter starts Kindergarten, my son will turn 1, and I will reach my 10th year at Penn State. Lots of things moving at the speed of light. I am not complaining, just searching for a way to slow it down a bit perhaps?

I know work has a tremendous amount to do with the feeling …

We are in the midst of the Digital Commons project. We talked about it last week on ETS Talk 28 and D’Arcy Norman actually took the time to write up his thoughts on the podcast. I won’t use this space to respond to D’Arcy, I’ll either drop him some comments or we’ll discuss on this week’s show. In this context, the Digital Commons has moved faster than most (if not all) of the projects I’ve been involved with at PSU. This thing has gone from idea to implementation in a span of weeks.

We’ve drawn a line in the sand and said we are going to spend more time investigating games for education. We are in the midst of designing a roadmap that will help guide our new Serious Games project right now … we are bringing new people on board to help us go down this path in a big way. I am not convinced that environments like SecondLife are where it is at, but I am happy to learn more and to understand more about why it has so many people excited.

And then there is administration and meetings. They pile up and you just have to wade through them. Some are very good and great things come out of them, so I don’t want to give the impression that it is all bad. Lots of people think going to meetings is a bad thing — honestly, in most cases good things happen at them. At all levels of the organization people are thinking big and trying new things … that makes it much more interesting.

We are also trying to “load the pipeline” on the next round of interesting things we are thinking about — all I can say is that a focus on creating collaborative opportunities on campus is at the center of it all. When I say that I am thinking about things from space design to new tools to support faculty and student collaborative opportunities. Much more on that in the coming weeks. I am in the midst of writing up several new project descriptions … there are some exciting things on the horizon!

So, not much of an inspired post, but it is something. I have to get my head back into the idea that I am doing this for me … this is really a place for me to track my own activities. The other thing I have to remember is that writing will not make time go faster of slower … the summer will end either way, the little lady will walk into Kindergarten by herself in the fall, and my little man will turn 1. I’d be nuts not to be thrilled to enjoy it all (even the meetings).