Curriculum Vitae

Professional Overview

Introduction

Pursuing a PhD is an academic endeavor, but I have taken great pains to ensure that in my case, it has not been an academic exercise. As I seek to solidify my transition from the world of technology in the corporate and business realm to using technology as a tool in non-profit, educational settings, I have consciously looked for ways to apply the product of my coursework at the school where I work. I'm pleased to say that, for the most part, I have been successful. Many of the ideas we discussed in class over the past three years, whether they be theoretical or practical in nature, have found their ways into professional development content I have produced or assisted in producing and the instructional design and philosophical topics we explored at UNT have manifested themselves, directly, into a course that I am developing and will deliver.

Reflective Intellectual Growth

This program has effectively shattered much of the intellectual confidence I had previously. I now know how much knowledge is out there that I truly do not know. That false intellectual confidence, I now realize, was a combination of hubris, bias, and plain old ignorance. What I gained as a result of this painful realization is the ability to have more and better questions, some of which I now dare ask.

My first true epiphany in the program happened when I realized that this program was not about content, but rather was about process. The professors here taught me a process of self-examination and self-reflection (some epistemological, some statistical), and paired that with relevant techniques of questioning and researching.

The lens through which I view scholarly and non-scholarly content has been irreversibly changed by thoughtful professors and classmates in this program who have candidly and constructively challenged me to defend my ideas. The informal authority I have garnered on-the-job, largely as a result of technical proficiency, has resulted in something of a halo effect, often giving my other ideas weight they did not deserve; there was no such informal authority in the discussion fora and synchronous online discussions in our classes. I quickly learned that I had to be able to support and defend any and all ideas lest a professor or classmate expose them as the ill-conceived ideas of an immature academic mind.

Research Interests

Scholarly/Research Interests

The high school where I work is a private, co-ed, Catholic, college preparatory school in East Dallas. The leadership has been very supportive of my participation in this doctoral program. The school is over 50 years old and it has a very progressive attitude towards education; during a recently concluded construction project, the school built five technology-heavy classrooms modeled on technology enabled active learning, TEAL, classrooms which gained prominence as a result of their use at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As I discussed my participation in this program with the president of the school, during the summer of 2015, our first in the program, he suggested that a worthwhile research endeavor would be for me to research the effectiveness of our TEAL classrooms. Nai?vely, I agreed.

While it remains my ultimate goal to research the effectiveness of our TEAL classrooms, I now realize that I cannot do that for my dissertation. I have always been careful to ensure that I am not perceived to be an advocate of TEAL classrooms, but rather as an objective observer seeking an objective truth about whether or not this teaching approach is demonstrably effective. I want my research to benefit students, not the marketing department.

This program has given me the opportunity to research topics about which I had not previously given much thought and to collaborate with individuals whose interests are very different from mine. The cohort model has been exceptionally meaningful to me because it essentially forced me to work collaboratively with people whose academic background, life experiences, and professional life has been very different from my own. The end product of our collaboration has often been better as a result of questions I asked, not answers I provided.

I am particularly proud of collaborative efforts, with individuals who, absent my participation in this program, both in the context of a course and outside of coursework, I would have not encountered. I have, as one might expect, written or presented with educators at various levels, from middle school, high school, and higher-ed. But I have also written and presented or collaborated with an athletic trainer, a project manager, a software developer, a librarian, a theology teacher, and a veterinary physiologist.

Each of these opportunities for collaboration provided me with insight on the problem at hand but also gave me exposure to perspectives on approaching problems that were different from my own. I learned that, in many cases, the challenge was not so much about the answer but rather about asking the right questions. This was definitely a paradigm shift for someone who, for much of their professional life, had been very much focused on getting the right answer.

Professional Goals

When I was preparing my application for this program and as I spoke with students in the program and professors in the department, I said that one of my professional goals was to find a more effective way to teach computer programming. That goal was left behind for a time when my administration asked me to focus on our TEAL classrooms. However, events have conspired and when the College Board released the curriculum for a new AP Computer Science Principles (AP–CSP) class, these two interests converged.

I am now in the process of adapting existing curricula for use in a TEAL classroom. using many of the theoretical and practical learning theories and instructional design techniques I've been exposed to in the past three years. I plan to teach this class in the 2018–19 academic year in a TEAL classroom. This is not an academic exercise.

Education

Scholarly Writings

Scholarly Image	Description	Scholarly Project
	X 1) One such thought experiment that I very much enjoyed resulted in the class paper Dorothy DeLay Meets Rosie the Robot Legendary violin teacher Dorothy DeLay, of Julliard, meets Rosie, the cartoon robot from the Jetsons… sort of prepared in CECS 6300 (now LTEC 6240) AI IN EDUCATION (Prof. Demitria Ennis-Cole - Maymester 2016). 1) One such thought experiment that I very much enjoyed resulted in the class paper Dorothy DeLay Meets Rosie the Robot Legendary violin teacher Dorothy DeLay, of Julliard, meets Rosie, the cartoon robot from the Jetsons… sort of prepared in CECS 6300 (now LTEC 6240) AI IN EDUCATION (Prof. Demitria Ennis-Cole - Maymester 2016).
	X 2) Paper ID: 52211 Title: "Implementation of Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL) classrooms: Preliminary Findings" Accepted as: Roundtable 2) Paper ID: 52211 Title: "Implementation of Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL) classrooms: Preliminary Findings" Accepted as: Roundtable

Professional Presentations

Title: Big Data Project Management Challenges and Specialized Skill Venue: ICKM Location: Dallas, TX, USA Date: October 2017