Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: One door closes, another opens...

Many people have been asking where I went, that they have not seen any new posts in some time.

Truth be told I have been focusing almost exclusively on work (distance education issues at my uni) and my dissertation research.

My day job as director of distance learning programming has taken several new and complex turns. Overall, our university budget cuts have been massive. Simultaneously, enrollments in our DE programs in the college have taken off exponentially. My units' funding model returns revenue directly to the college which in turn has provided us with a comfortable cushion. In other words, while other departments are suffering, mine has been growing flush with resources. This has put me and my staff in the spotlight as more academic units turn to us to see how they too can flourish moving courses online. Making issues more complicated, we recently completed a search for a new associate dean, i.e., my boss, which put many strategic and policy considerations on hold while working through the search process.

And just when I thought things were safe, our amazing, witty, and wonderful instructional designer announced her resignation thus putting me and out IT expert in charge of finishing course development projects.

So, while all this has been going on during regular working hours, I have written and defended my dissertation proposal (chapters one, two, and three) and have been collecting and analyzing data. Data collection will end in April 2008 and my goal is to synthesize it all and defend the final product/book in August 2008. As such writing on my weblog has had to take a back seat. (heavy sigh)

I miss writing and reading edublogger material. I have found a few spare moments to follow my favorites and occassionally distract myself on Twitter. I miss interacting with my virtual friends (that probably comes across sounding odd).

To make matters more topsy, Ben and Dave's announced closure of Eduspaces, my virtual home since 2005. I want to go on record to say that the Elgg/Eduspaces boys and community have been absolutely fabulous and a tremendous asset to me, academically, pedagogically, emotionally, and spiritually. Without Elgg/Eduspaces I probably would never have stuck with blogging.

Dave and Ben (and Misja) have always been responsive to my needs as an educator and writer. I knew from the start that Elgg/Eduspaces was their labour of love--that it was time intensive and resource consuming for them. They built Elgg with sweat equity while they continuously searched for ways to fund development, maintenance, server capacity, etc. Who would expect that they could keep supporting the site and feed themselves and their families for free? I applaud their efforts and sadly understand why they cannot maintain such an endeavor. 

I am currently in the process of building a new site. I purchased the domain "xl-medium.net" (i.e., "extra large medium") and will begin migrating content over the next month or so. Dave and Ben have assured me that links to My Eduspaces site will remain active which is a good thing since there are numerous links, sites, and projects linked to several of my posts.

I am still wrestling with how the new site will work. I need a site for professional purposes linking to academic papers, projects, fora, and my "notebook" i.e., my weblog. I am looking at developing the site using Drupal which will allow me to manage various types of content more easily. As such, I will be laying low as I make this change a reality. I will maintain a presense on Twitter and keep people apprised of my progress.

I want to thank the edublogger community/network for their support and for continuously writing, reflecting, sharing, tweeting, and collaborating across the globe. I'll be back soon and hopefully will have something meaningful to contribute to the ongoing conversation.

One door closes, another opens...