end of summer

Summer officially ended yesterday with the first faculty duty day. I spent the morning beta testing the new website builder for SJSU that will allow faculty to (fairly) easily develop webpages and make course information accessible to students. The pages will listed at people.sjsu.edu, a much friendlier URL than the previous one. And the URLs for the faculty sites will be more logical as well. My beta site is up for the next 2 weeks. I'm not doing too much with it because I'll lose all the work when beta testing is over. The system is far better than Spartan web wizard, which is completely nonintuitive.

At noon yesterday the new SJSU president, Jon Whitmore, spoke. He's started his own blog, although there's no way to comment on it. It's really just a webpage that SJSU's PR office calls a blog. But maybe this does indicate his desire to move SJSU into the 21st century.

The last part of the day was the department faculty meeting. With all the lecturers and TAs, we fill the COMM Lab. Once that group leaves, tho, there are just over a handful of tenure-track faculty. Administrators like a faculty with a high percentage of lecturers, but because only a few have service duties, it puts a tremendous burden on the tenure-track faculty. We simply don't have the number of faculty we need to complete all the tasks that need to get done.

Today is our second duty day. The college meeting was this morning. Not many faculty there; everyone's getting ready for the start of classes next week. With SJSU facing record enrollments, Monday will be hectic. I'll be home in Santa Cruz, teaching online.

~ Professor Cyborg