In 2010, I took my career in a different direction and now I am a Solutions Director at Blackboard, Inc. Today, I work with institutions and organizations to help them best use technology to support teaching and learning.
Prior to Blackboard, I spent 18 years at the University of Chicago where my last two positions were the Assistant Chief Information Technology Officer and Executive Director for Campus & Academic Services. In these roles, I reported to the Associate Vice-President and Chief Information Technology Officer for Information Technology Services, and as such, had the overall responsibility for technologies and services that directly impacted the research, teaching, and learning mission of the institution and supported campus life and staff activities of the university.
Having worked in or around higher education for longer than I spent growing up in my childhood home allowed me to develop a rather interesting perspective on higher education and information technology in academe. As a result, some of my work-related interests include developing physical and virtual collaborative technology environments (which includes the relationship of people, technology and space), exploring new and non-traditional avenues for building inter-organizational relationships, and investigating personal, social, and shared technologies as alternatives to the desktop/server status quo. To put it another way, accomplish what my University of Chicago staff characterized in its overall unit vision – create an organization that balances stability with innovation. This notion is coupled with looking forward at what will impact us tomorrow and the continual organizational evolution that must occur to meet the set of challenges that will arrive the day after tomorrow. My thoughts along these lines can be found on my professional blog, Wrangling ACT, and in various articles I’ve written or co-authored over the years.
In 2008, I became co-director of projectbamboo, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded cyberinfrastructure planning project for the arts and humanities. Along with David Greenbaum, Director of Data Services at UC-Berkeley, we led a global effort to help institutions better enable and support innovation in arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences through the use of shared technology services. We thought maybe 50 institutions and about 120 people would be interested in participating but by the end of the first workshop, over 100 institutions and well over 600 people participated in the discussions. Working on projectbamboo taught me a lot about community-based collaboration and has firmly cemented the notion of community-source as a viable development direction.
Outside of work, I enjoy listening to music, creating songs and independent films, trying different cuisines, experiencing different cultures, exploring cities and their surroundings, taking pictures, dabbling in model railroading, and setting aside time for casual walks to clear the mind. Some of my thoughts can be found on my personal blog, Friday Sushi.
Photograph by Quinn Dombrowski: www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/4680339423/
