College Roles:



I analyze the deluge of scholarly articles about computers in the humanities and communicate with the Dean about anything relevant to our complex and multifaceted situations. As College Computer Education Coordinator, I also serve on the college Computer Advisory Committee, a body that advises Dean McDermid on how to allocate funding for instructional equipment. Our other projects include creating faculty and student labs and participating in decision-making about access, equity and long-term planning. I serve as well as a mentor to the many centers, programs and departments that intend to use computers for research, community service and teaching. In this role I plan and give workshops on using email, lists, the library, the world wide web. I have worked and continue to work one-on-one with dozens of colleagues in the college on everything from programmatic development to individual websites; and have given and continue to give dozens of workshops, each designed to fit the needs of a given group within the college.

With the help of interested colleagues, for example, I developed Convergent Computer Research, a course in the interdisciplinary Humanities/Science program at my university, NEXA, that continues to be offered by other professors (please see the article cited in the Gruber collection, Weaving a Virtual Web for more information). For the English Department I designed a series of workshops on using the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment (D.I.W.E.), Storyspace, word processing, the world wide web. These workshops, which were led by a colleague in the summer of 1999, were heavily attended by those English Department faculty members in the Composition Program who planned to take advantage of the then-new technology-enhanced English classroom. I also chaired a committee of colleagues to conceptualize and develop the first technology-enhanced classroom.

In another central part of this work as College of Humanities Computer Education Coordinator, I designed and continue to maintain a web site for the College of Humanities, the Humanities Educational Leadership Program (H.E.L.P.), a site that attracts a global audience of some ten thousand users a month in this its fifth year. H.E.L.P. includes a faculty showcase that I developed to showcase outstanding faculty work with computers in the classroom and, more recently, on their other technology-enhanced professional projects. It contains a glossary of computer terms for beginners, a vast reference library, and links to the best resources in the humanities for every program, center and department in the college. Part of my work involves maintaining this site with the cooperation of the college technical staff, which has consistently provided encouragement, support and resources for the college. Another part of this work has been educating graduate students to help me with programming and design for the site; these students have now entered doctoral programs or moved to commercial web enterprises in part because of the expertise they gathered while working on H.E.L.P. The H.E.L.P. site was showcased as an outstanding web project in 1999 by the California state-wide Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT).