Commencement 2009

Graduation is always a nice experience, despite the long roll call of diplomas. Actually, this event was larger than usual, and we moved along expeditiously. One day I'll get decent regalia (I'm still using the throw-away stuff meant to be used 2-3 times).

Tenure and Promotion!

The good news came on April 30, although I had already left the office. So the envelope was sitting in my mailbox when I came in to the office on Friday May 1. It's nice that the news is in all caps to begin the letter. The process of putting together the dossier takes quite a bit of time, since you have to account for and justify your work in enough detail so that people who know very little about you will get a good sense of your work. It also helps to organize the dossier, so that people will know where to find everything they are looking for. I turned in the whole thing very early in the Fall semester and then simply have to wait as it makes it through all the committees at the university for the tenure process.

I'm very happy to say the least but am also not quite sure what to feel in some ways. There are other mountains to climb, but this is putting a big goal behind me. I will be directing the doctoral program, so there are many goals I have for that. I also want to produce more scholarship, a lot of which is in the works. I have a busy summer, so I can't just rest on my laurels, but I am going to be celebrating in various little ways.

2009 UDM Research Day & Poster Fair

We had a really nice turn out for the annual poster fair at UDM. It takes a lot of work by a lot of people for this to run smoothly. I'm on the Faculty Development Team which puts this together each year. But most of the credit really goes to the Team chair, Matt Mio, Ph.D. who keeps this ball rolling and herds the cats. This continues to go over well, and perhaps next year we'll be able to expand it significantly.

Faculty Achievement Award

I was happy to receive the UDM Faculty Achievement Award on November 7. It is a really nice dinner and a chance to talk with a large bunch of faculty at the same time. I got to make some comments for about 5 minutes. The faculty agree that this event is well-done by the university. I hung the plaque in my office at UDM. I got the pictures today, so I wasn't able to put any up until now.

Celebrate Spirit 2008

This is from the most recent Celebrate Spirit at UDM. This involves a mass and picnic with classes operating on an adjusted schedule for the day. I think it has become a better attended activity over the time I have been at UDM. This year Chrysler sponsored the picnic and had a bunch of new cars out on the fountain area. It was a beautiful day and a nice change of pace.

Action...

Since the Spring I have been involved in planning and creating an instructional video for an intelligence test. The video is simply an in-house affair to be used in training our students. We'll be able to put the video up on the secure server for the class, and students can watch the video online as an aid to learning how to administer the test. It's actually quite an involved project. We have had to break every aspect of the testing into its components and figure out how it should look inorder. I have been working with the folks from the Instructional Design Studio at UDM. Simply known as IDS, these folks help the faculty to integrate variou sforms of technology into teaching. The idea is to make the process useful and actually benefit education and not merely "bells and whistles". Today I brought some images over to IDS. We have already shot the footage, and I have done the voiceovers. They are editing the digital video. I plan to use it this semester. It has been a great learning experience to "direct" this video, and better understand how vidoe and films are put together.