ITC Alumni Blog

Here’s a couple recent pictures of Wendy and me:

Well, since my last post was 20 pages about myself, I thought I’d also try to devote some time to the other presentations that I saw. Since one of the conference tracks was about virtual worlds, and since the NMC has dedicated a great deal of time and money to Second Life, there were many presentations about teaching classes in Second Life (or similar games), the types of classes that can be taught in SL, and the lessons to be learned from it. I attended three presentations on various aspects of this topic. The first, by Ed Lamoreux from Bradley University (Illinois), discussed a class that he was preparing to teach in Second Life on social science research methods. The idea was that students would learn how to interview/research without having to leave their homes; his reasoning for this (in addition to the research potential of online spaces) was that students in research methodology courses often tried to go to dangerous parts of town for their initial research, and he wanted them to first develop their skills in a safe environment. He discussed a number of issues, including problems getting permission to research from Linden Labs (the creators of SL) and the possible hardware issues. One of the more interesting aspects was that this course was being taught during Winter Intersession, a three-week intensive quarter during January (three class hours a day, five days a week). Since many students traveled home during the intersession, and since Peoria gets very cold and snowy during January, teaching the class in an online environment gave more students the option of participating not only in the course, but in the intersession at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I’ll have to dig around on Flickr for some pictures and add them later, but in the meantime I wanted to say that the NMC Fall Regional conference this year was fantastic. The event was held at Trinity University in San Antonio, a lovely campus in a lovely city. The three conference tracks were “Bringing Virtual 3-D Worlds to Reality,” “Embracing the New Web” (the so-called Web 2.0), and “The Future of Scholarship,” in which latter category was included my presentation, “The UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology: The Future of the Past.” The title is somewhat deceptive: My presentation was only half about the UEE, although a number of attendees were very interested in that half, especially in Willeke and Jacco’s success in getting the rest of the Egyptological community to “buy-in” to the idea of an online publication. Although many attendees were pushing for more collaborative work, a la wikis, the bulk of them realized that the combination of peer review and the slow rate of change in academia means that the UEE is a very important step in the evolution of scholarship. Read the rest of this entry »

Our baby arrived on October 8. The labor lasted over 36 hours–I didn’t think I was going to survive it! But she was finally born healthy and beautiful. Wendy weighed in at 7 lbs. 2 oz. and measured 20 in. long. We have a blog all about her but it’s got a password to keep strangers out. Email me (hwoz@ucla.edu) and I will send you the link and password.

Here are some pictures:

Hi all,

This is mainly a test post for me because I’ve never edited a blog before. I have a dissertation year fellowship for 2006-07 and hope to GRADUATE in June. I’ll be on campus a lot, so I’m round. I’m also testing how to post an image.

Well, I just got an email from Grace Tam saying that she was far too busy these days to start updating a second blog, so instead she gave me the address of her normal blog, in English and Chinese, and asked me to post that. Its address is http://renaissanceofgrace.blogspot.com/, and I have also added it to the “Other ITC Links” on the sidebar.

Hi all! This alumni blog is a great idea. Thanks to Annelie for thinking of it and John for setting it up.

My big announcement is that Luke and I are expecting a baby! The due date is October 13 and we’ve chosen to be surprised about the sex. I held off on telling most people at UCLA until I really began showing, so that’s why you may not have heard about it.

Here’s a picture of me about a month ago, in front of our new car (we traded in Luke’s pickup truck for a more family-friendly vehicle):

And here’s a picture of “the wee little one” as Luke likes to call him/her:

In other news… Luke has left his ITS job at USC and actually become a Bruin. He’s now working for GSEIS (Graduate School of Education and Information Studies). I still can’t get over the fact that he’s at UCLA. He has a Bruincard and everything! He just started this week, and so far things are going well.

I am still working on my dissertation on gothic drama. I spent a fair amount of time at the Huntington Library this summer, and hopefully the research will improve my writing. I’m taking off the fall quarter since the baby is coming, but in winter and spring I’ll be teaching again.

That’s all for now!

As promised, a few shots from the wedding. Click on them for the full photo. I must say, I was quite pleased with the way the whole thing turned out.

This is Heather and me, doing our “wedding photo” pose thing in front of Block Island’s South Lighthouse. At least, I think it was the South Lighthouse. There’s also a North Lighthouse. Honestly, my mind wasn’t on the direction I was facing at the time.

Ah, the party. Dare I say, the mad partying. Yes, there was a conga line. No, I was not responsible. I realize that must sound a bit unlikely, given my and my wife’s presenes at the head of said line, but really, I think someone forced us up there. Probably one of those munchkin nieces of mine in the middle of the line there.

Sunset over New Harbor, Block Island. Our hotel, the Narragansett Inn (also the site of the reception) is right on the water there. So, this is looking out from the back lawn of the hotel, where our reception also was (right behind the photographer).

John has summarized the goal of this blog very well, so let me just reiterate that we hope this will become a living record of what our ITC alumni are doing — progress on dissertations, career moves, family news, and anything you want to share with us. Please include pictures and audio/video links you want to share. And, feel free to comment on other alumni posts, to continue the tradition of spirited dialogue that continues in the ITC lab.

Given as I set this blog up, I figured that I ought to salt the proverbial tip jar and make the first post. As a few of you may know, I am under one month away from the end of my tenure as an ITC. It’s been three years; two as an ITC, and this past year as Senior ITC (a position that didn’t exist “back in the old days,” as I fondly remember my first year ITCing in the basement of Kinsey). Now, having (finally) taken and passed all of my doctoral exams, I am preparing to spend a year applying my ITC-honed “mad computer skizzils” by working for the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, doing I know not what. But it should be fun; it takes a lot of work to make Egyptology boring, and I’m waaaay to lazy to put in that kind of work. Beyond that, I’ve found that I have a lot of fun working with instructional technology and digital media, so I’m seriously considering looking for work along the lines of CDH! I’m also throwing around the idea of getting a Teaching Credential and teaching high school history; I enjoy teaching, but if my five+ years here at UCLA have taught me anything, it’s that I don’t really want to deal with being on the faculty at a high-powered research institution, and no one else hires Assyriologists! Also, I expect that I’ll be able to apply a lot of my educational technology skills as a teacher, as well, so it feels like a good match.

As for my personal life, y’all may not know that I am happily married, and have been so for over year now. Heather, my long-suffering girlfriend “back in the old days,” is now my long-suffering wife, but she’s still talking to me, so I guess I’m doing something right. I’ll upload a couple of nice wedding pictures when I get home tonight; we had the wedding on Block Island, Rhode Island (Heather is from New England, so that’s her “hood”), so it was pretty beautiful, if I do say so myself. I’m currently NOT dissertating; CDH decided to sponsor an ITC contest, challenging us to develop an instructional technology tool of our own, e.g. a website, piece of software, etc., so I decided to pursue my recently developed interest in educational gaming and have spent a large chunk of the last two months trying to program my own video game in Flash. The game will be a mock archaeological dig, where the player takes on the role of dig director, and (at its most basic level) will help 6th graders learn about ancient history and archaeology. When it’s done, I’ll put a link to it up here, if anyone wants to play. Once I finish it (hopefully, in the next 8 days, since that’s when the contest ends!), I’ll have to get back to dissertating, this time seriously.

Well, that’s all that’s new in my world. Hopefully, we’ll hear from all of you in the near future!