The Now: February 15, 2023

Yesterday was Valentine's Day. Our kiddo came home from school with a small bag of delights from her her classmates. It was a mix of homemade cards, commercial valentines, and little toys. I remember the days of those little cardstock cards in school and I wish I had the forethought to give some to my colleagues. I think it would be fun to drop off a cheesy, mass-produced card for everyone. Maybe next year.

Here's what else has my attention:

1. Research Assignment Design: We are doing two things on this right now. First, we're conducting our second pass of coding. This time, we're focusing on single groups of codes. It's a lot easier to fly through transcripts when you only need to think about one general idea. Next, we're reviewing the assignments to try to get some quantitative data. I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was that everyone is doing an annotated bibliography assignment. It really is an essential step in learning the research process.
2. Email Outreach Changes: I use MailChimp to out send out our internal and subscription newsletters. I also use it to send out occasional emails to all faculty. Sadly, MailChimp is changing it's free plan and now I am on the hunt for a new vendor. I want something fairly easy to use. I also want something that can grow with us without being crazy expensive. I've got a short list of options, but I'm really hoping we can just go with the new newsletter platform built in to our website management system. That would be so easy and would provide a lot of added on things we can use. Relatedly, I finally got the library added to our student advising system. Now, faculty can refer students directly to the library in that system. Additionally - and more awesomely - I can create email campaigns to contact students directly. I sent out my first blast to anyone enrolled in a independent study, research, writing, or upper-level symposium course. It was kind of a pain to build the email list, but once I figured that out, the rest was set it and forget. I'm very excited to see that our open rate was over 60% and several students have already sent me thank you emails. This may be my new favorite tool.
3. Personal Digital Clean Up: I'm still unfollowing/unsubscribing to a lot of things. It's amazing how much time this has already freed up. I'm also rejiggering how many online platforms I use. This bit is harder. Between the Google Suite, Trello, OneDrive/OneNote, and Evernote (plus a few small others), I've got lots of things in a lot of places. I'm trying to streamline how I use it all. The problem is, I use each platform differently. I can't really stop using any of them because no one platform works perfectly. Instead, I'm trying to make each platform work a little bit better. I'm also seeing where I can consolidate so that one place becomes the primary platform.

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