SPRING 2009 :: Introductions

[Brandy]

I'm Brandy Thatcher, the facilitator for the workshop. I'm a media
developer in our faculty development area at Illinois Central College.
I've worked at ICC for about 8 years. I work one-on-one with faculty
to develop instructional materials in all sorts of media for their
courses, both online and traditional. I also teach a variety of
software based and web 2.0 workshops for faculty and for our community
Funshops. I eat, sleep, and drink technology and love all of the new
and emerging technologies being introduced daily.

My background is in Graphic Design and I just completed an Associates
in Web Technologies (web design and programming). My favorite
programming language is Actionscript, but I do a lot of javascript,
xhtml, ajax, xml and a little php/ asp.net.

Your Turn? Tell us a little about yourself, your job, your interest?
Any special technology interest?

What do you hope to get out of this workshop?

[mdub...@gmail.com]

My name is Mark DuBois. I have been working with web systems since
1992. I believe fewer than 500 people in the world can make that
statement. I have been teaching at ICC since 1999. I presently serve
as the Director of Education for the World Organization of Webmasters
(HQ - Folsom, CA). I have been working in that role since 2006. I was
also selected as an Adobe Higher Education Leader in 2008 (only 2
community college faculty were chosen - the remainder come from
universities). I also run a local Adobe user group. Our next meeting
is March 26 (TC 210 6:30 p.m. - consider yourself invited)

I developed the ICC Web Systems degree (which is the oldest accredited
degree in the world). We presently offer 5 certificates in addition to
the degree. The Rich Internet Application Developer certificate is
also recognized as the oldest accredited certificate in RIA (of which
Web 2.0 technologies such as we are using are a part).

I am capable of teaching any of the 18 separate classes we offer in
web systems (and have taught or co-taught most of them). I write
equally bad code in roughly 50 different programming languages (all
the ones mentioned by Brandy in her opening mesage are among them). My
main areas of specialization include web application security and web
accessibility. I most recently reviewed the web standards curriculum
project section dealing with web accessibility [http://
interact.webstandards.org/curriculum/front-end-development/
accessibility?contributors]. I serve on the HTML 5 working group of
the W3C as an invited expert. I also gave a pre-conference seminar at
the 17th annual WWW Conference in Beijing in 2008.

I supervise the SkillsUSA web page contest for both the state of
Illinois and the national contest in Kansas City (and have done so for
the past 5 years). I also serve as a reviewer for CHOICE, Pearson and
several other textbook publishers (mostly in the areas of web
systems).

What do I hope to get out of this workshop? As you may gather from the
introduction above, I know a fair amount about this technology (and
can write the code to make most of it work as desired if needed). Yes,
I am a power user/ early adopter of these technologies. That being
said, no one can know it all and I like to participate in these events
when possible to see what others are doing. I also like to see how
various technologies are evolving/ migrating towards mainstream use in
education. Students in my classes have had to update wiki spaces for a
number of semesters now. I am curious to learn what others are doing.

[Laura]

Hi,
My name is Laura Cashmer and Im very excited about taking this
workshop! I have worked at Joliet Jr. College for three years now as
an Assistant Professor of Speech Communication. I currently teach
traditional, online and blended speech classes. I am hoping that this
workshop shows me many different technologies that I could use in my
classroom.

I am currently taking a podcasting class in hopes of using that
technology in all of my classes. Im up for learning about any
technology! Whatever will help my students out more is great for me!

[bthat]

Glad you could join us Laura. Hope you'll find some great technologies
you can use with your classes.
We will touch a little on podcasting and creating audio in week 3.
There are many ways you can create audio and podcast, no way is better
than another, just find the one that works best for you.

Students love the audio and being able to download podcast. I
occassionaly do a mp3 player check... I walk down the hallway in-
between classes and count the number of students that are listening to
an mp3 player. I'm always amazed by the number of students that have
them. That just tells me it's another good outlet to reach some of
them.

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> - Show quoted text -

[bthat]

Thanks for joining us Mark. I just finished the web technology program
with Mark.
Mark, I'm looking forward to your insight on the workshop and how I
can make it more useful for faculty.