The light at the end of the tunnel

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I've had a heavy teaching load since week 35 (and before - planning the courses), but all lectures and seminars in my two courses (DM2571 Future of Media and DM2573 Sustainability and Media Technology) will end on the very same day - this coming Wednesday (Oct 10). Future of Media will continue throughout the autumn term, but it switches from the "course" part to the "project" part where students work autonomously and independently (outside of my immediate supervision). That for sure represents a lot less work and a lot less pressure for me (but probably more work for the students).

I've met these two groups of students in average 8 times (16 hours) per week for a period of 7 weeks ending this coming week. That might not sound like a lot, but each occasion demands (sometimes substantial) preparations or follow-up work (preparing for a lecture or a seminar, preparing, coaching and meeting up with a guest lecturer, planning a panel with invited guests, preparing written instructions, clarifying and answering questions about those instructions, deciding/coordinating/discussing/evaluating stuff with my course assistant(s), reading student assignments, keeping track of seminar groups and student attendance, scanning a text, uploading a presentation, booking a projector, making a change in the schedule, communicating and explaining that change to the students and on an on and on). Then there are of course other job-related commitments I haven't been able to evade or put aside and this has all in all been a period where I have not been able to do anything but the most crucial and pressing tasks.

You can check out the two blogs I have used for administering and disseminating information to the course participants to get a feeling of the pace and scope of the activities (28 blog posts and 17 blog posts in these two blogs just during the 20 weekday in the calendar month of September).

Anyway, it all ends soon and will then have time to look at everything I have put aside during this already-very-and-then-increasingly hectic period. Just thinking about the post-October-10 period actually feels like some kind of vacation to me right now... :-)    Still, there still remains 16 hours of lectures and seminars and teaching during Monday-Wednesday this coming week, and then I and my course assistant Leif will meet the dozen brand new Future of Media project groups (that will work on different topics vis-a-vis the "The future of magazines" theme) during Thursday-Friday. After that I have to read and grade 50 home exams and take care of previously-put-aside tasks... Still, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now and I very much look forward to not having to work every night when the kids have gone to bed and during weekends!

As an aside, with this or perhaps the next blog post, I expect to pass last year's count of unique visitors to the blog (see picture). That isn't as impressive as it sounds as this is the 57th blog post during 2012 and I only published 54 blog posts last year (2011). I will follow this short message up with a more detailed analysis of blog traffic and the development of the blog sometime later during the autumn (after Oct 10!).
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