So, Why Me?

Life out on the edge of things is tricky, but somebody’s got to do it.

How did I come to be the instructor for the Emerging Technologies course?

I suspect that most of the reason has to do with having been fortunate enough to just be standing there at critical points in UWF’s technological development and being foolish enough to act on opportunities that everyone else seemed to be hesitant to take on. Without making any claims to being better at this than anyone else, I will say that I am curious to a fault and, having raised three kids, have learned not to be very concerned about looking foolish (coming to work every day with barf on the back of you shoulder, or a ring of drool stains around your knees does that to you.)

If you are interested, I’ll run down a sort of chronological list of interesting predicaments in which I have found myself over the years. This will not only give you some perspective on what makes me tick, but will also explain how I have come to be the boring old guy you see before you today.

One of the first technology projects in which I was engaged was the capture and digitization of a video clip to play before a meeting of the Board of Regents (yes, that long ago). It took two weeks to configure the capture card, record the video, compress it by hand and produce a 160×120 image in a standalone player that ran on a 3-gun cathode ray projector that required the entire room to be completely dark to see the shadowy 12fps 1 minute clip.  It was the first one ever presented on campus.

My unit at the time was the pioneering adopter of a local area network of PC computers. At the time, all computing was done through terminals attached by coax cable to a mainframe. We had 8086 IBMs running DOS and Novell 1.0 over Token Ring at a blinding 4MB/s. We even had a file server with a 10MB hard drive, another first. I initiated the first digital inventory system for our media equipment, and actually managed to get our film and video collection into the library online catalog, though it was still mainframe-based at the time.

We were looking for ways to improve the effectiveness of faculty lectures and turned to evaluating and using multimedia authoring tools. I learned and taught Macromedia Authorware, Asymmetrix Toolbox and a dozen in between. Eventually, PowerPoint became useful. I still teach Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Flash for our Office of Continuing Ed. just for the fun of it. (having three kids in college is a strong motivator)

As the internet caught fire, we looked for ways to avoid making every course from scratch by hand as we had been doing and I ended up selecting and teaching our first two Learning Management Systems (TopClass, and WebCT), and served on the evaluation committee for all of them since.

I experimented with ISDN-based video conferencing in the desktop, when every step had to be configured by hand, and then designed and implemented the next three generations of interactive digital video distance learning systems used on campus.

I was heavily involved in the design of our campus’ optical fiber backbone, and in the evaluation and selection of the Siemens telephony system that we use today.

I managed the development and delivery of the first completely online undergraduate degree program at UWF. This program was also the first undergraduate program to be delivered via handheld PDAs, back when they were still called PDAs under contract to the Coast Guard and Navy.

I was the designer of the underlying technology and worked on the design team for the development of a reusuable object-based integrated teaching and learning system for middle-school science teachers called QuickScience. It had a repository of standards-aligned objects, a scope and sequence builder for the teacher to use to assemble the curriculum from the repository, a pretesting system that adapted the standard curriculum load for any individual student with customized combinations of content to remediate areas needing the most work. The system included an adaptive master delivery model that both let the learner move on once mastery was established, but also flagged the learner for individual attention when the remediation component was exhausted without mastery.

I was a Florida Orange Grove Scholar, a sort of evangelist for a statewide learning object repository.

I was the first on campus to use elluminate! and later Skype for advising as well as teachng.

The Next Exit History project, (http://nextexithistory.com) which includes a free iOS and Android app you can download now and use, is based on the underlying architecture and design I have been developing for the past few years, called the TellusPoint Engine.

I have also been heavily involved in the design, develoment and implementation of curriculum for the National Flight Academy and the related Aviation Classroom Experience (ACE) classroom projects. This involves a host oftechnologies assembled and aligned to create an immersive learning environment to enable learners to develop STEM skills aligned with state and national standards in a highly engaging experience.

So, why me? I think it’s because I am starting to see patterns in how these things happen, rise, and fade away.

What’s next? I don’t know, but I can’t wait to find out, and as the Blue Angels always say, “I’m glad to be here.”