Legacy Thoughts

I'm counting down the number of Mondays remaining in my university teaching career and with around four dozen Mondays on my academic schedule I've started thinking about what I will leave behind and who would be interested in the remnants of 25 years of my teaching on the same campus.

I reckon the small building holding eight classrooms will still be standing well beyond its useful life. And the information technology infrastructure will keep ticking over. In fact, the IT services will undoubtedly improve while the building's roof continues to leak.

It's those IT services that concern me--in a good way. I've uploaded and refined more than a terabyte of high quality academic material onto the campus SharePoint services. I can search that material with standard finder tools as well as with Microsoft Copilot's large language library. But since the Office Graph has not been enabled for our information services, it's unusual for anyone to serendipitously discover what I'm teaching. And that means very little cross-modular collaboration between lecturers and researchers.

I've often wondered if I should petition Science Foundation Ireland for PhD funding to study this shortfall in academic institutions. I know that most items I express about Creative Commons sharing through Open Education Resources falls on deaf ears. And I also know there's a hornet's nest just underneath any discussion about ownership of academic materials. These are some of the sentiments underpinning the reason for limited discovery of emerging material across all the higher level academic institutions in Ireland.

Knowing these deep-seated sentiments, I wonder if I can ever hope to leave behind a polished legacy. This is the idea I'm sharing with the Congregation Unconference discussion about Legacy in November 2024.