Early in our professional careers, my husband and I called ourselves “academic gypsies.” The search for stable jobs for two newly minted PhDs was no easy task. In search of that ideal situation, we lived, moved, worked, and straddled seven states in 12 years with short stints in the Philippines and Washington, DC. As this paper explains, we were your classical nomads that encompassed the mobility of our complete household to new locations in search of resources that would allow us to raise a family and put stability in our lives. The paper is based on an ethnographic study of the work/life practices of nomadic academics like us. The authors presented a paper on this topic at the 2017 Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) conference.

Obviously our experience occurred before the ubiquity of mobile devices and social media. Being at the forefront of computer-mediated instruction, I can understand the change in the workplace that technology has brought to academia. I was there at the beginning of personal computing, and I have seen the development of the mobility of the workplace to such a point that I still recall the first time I collaborated on a chapter for a book that ambitiously was compiled through email!

This is what makes the paper so interesting--the academic reader can identify with what the authors are pointing to. The workplace has changed. The workload has changed. It has been changed by technology, leading to the concept of nomadicity, the term used to describe the fluidity and flexibility of interactions so that, in the example of academia, the academic finds himself or herself in a constant state of mobility. The office can be anywhere because we check our email through mobile devices and respond to the needs of our students anytime, anywhere. The workload has changed since we can do our work on a plane or train, or in a coffee shop. Fast food joints offer “free Wi-Fi” all the time! Nomadicity provides academics with the advantages of doing work on their own time, in whatever location they find themselves in, using various devices available to them and with whichever collaborators they want to work with. However, such availability has its consequences. Because students and collaborators know that you can be available 24/7, you are expected to be available 24/7. It could feel like your private life is no longer your own. It takes a good amount of discipline to carve out only certain amounts of time to devout to teaching and research beyond the regular eight-hour workday, 40-hour work week. What academic sticks to that?

The work chronicles for us what we already know, such as the motivational factors that account for nomadicity as a teaching and research method choice, which students and administrators should be made aware of. The work, however, does not seem to provide the reader with a strong sense of the usefulness of the findings or areas for further research, unless it is disseminated to a wide range of policymakers in academia such as members of boards of regents and administrators responsible for making decisions with regard to retention, tenure, and promotion that are impacted by such nomadicity. But it does outline various limitations of a study that does not rely on a large sample. As an academic, one would like to know where nomadicity will lead us in terms of the future features of teaching and learning as well as research in a university setting.