The quarter proceeds, sometimes painfully. Teaching is one of my responsibilities at the iSchool. This week, teaching was especially rewarding because our guest speaker was Dr. Denzil Suite, UW’s vice president for student life, who oversees everything from housing to counseling to the UW police. Students were on top of their game last evening with questions for him ranging from COVID precautions to tuition costs for international students. And in the Monday evening class, students contributed significantly to our discussion of the two faces of artificial intelligence.
Teaching is one component of my job: the others are service and scholarship. I am in my third year as one of two representatives that the teaching professors have on the Elected Faculty Council (EFC), a key partner in what is called the university’s shared governance process. The other members represent the assistant, associate and full professors at the iSchool. The council is responsible for presiding over monthly faculty meetings, for the content presented to the faculty, and for reporting back to the faculty on work it has decided it would like the EFC to undertake in any given year. EFC meetings are lively, with a fair amount of discussion on any given issue, be it appointing search committees, working on revisions to existing policies, reviewing requests for sabbaticals, or convening with the iSchool’s leadership cabinet to review the budget.
Related to both teaching and service is other work that falls in both categories: meeting with job search candidates and attending their research presentations or teaching demonstrations; working with the officers of the UW ISACA Student Chapter as their advisor to help plan activities; overseeing independent studies, and writing letters of reference for students or colleagues.
Next week both students and I get a much needed break for Thanksgiving week. Then we come back and move into the final stretch of the quarter. Though the pandemic has made everything harder, it has still been a quarter of which to be proud.