Last week, I frightened a student who was peering into my office from the hallway. Spellbound, she hadn’t realized anyone was sitting right behind the door. She sheepishly admitted that the screens and flashing lights had flooded her with curiosity, distracting her with the question of precisely what they might all be for.
For the past ten years, a dizzying curiosity has drawn me into this office as well. My title is “Technical Support Specialist”, where “Specialist” encapsulates the roles of instructor, investigator, designer, project planner, programmer, administrator, auditor, and counselor, among others. But that description is beguilingly imprecise, substituing confusion for clarity and dissuading further inquiry.
Rather, I reframe and reformulate information technology questions for faculty, staff, and students. I determine how information technology can be made to work for individuals to advance an educational mission. Then, I assist in planning, implementation, assessment, and iteration of said implementation.
I do not provide answers; I have none. I am not a help desk. I am in IT, but I am not of it, having formally studied music, history, and education. I pursue professional development at every opportunity while accepting the limits of my own knowledge. And I do not pretend to separate the emotional and aesthetic dimensions of technology from the practical and utilitarian.
The question of what I do is really about my value proposition, and to that end I proffer myself as both teacher and student. I devote my energies to determining the role of computing devices in the learning process, the fidelity of our digital data as historical record, and the workflow that optimizes and democratizes the production of our cultural content. I treat every context, for good or for ill, as a classroom.
Ten years is a long time to do any one thing with your life, unless it is a thing you truly love. My passion is the intersection of information technology and education. Even so, I know that I’ll be ready to move on if and when the screens and flashing lights fail to excite me with hints of their potential and possibility, and should the confidence that I have something to add wither on the vine.