Tag Archives: MSU

I’m a student again, and tardy already!

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After a nine-year break, I’ve enrolled again at Michigan State University!

Back in 1998 or 99 I took a full-time job offer producing websites, and never finished my degree in English. So, finally, I’ll finish it off this semester. If everything goes as planned, I should graduate this May.

I’m taking one class: REL 350–Buddhism in South Asia. It’s once a week and meets for about three hours, which works out great because it interferes minimally with work and my time with my daughters.

Yesterday was a big day for me–my first day of class in nearly a decade. So, here’s the funny part.

At 4:20 PM, one of my coworkers asked, “So, how did that class go?” And then I realized I had forgotten about class, and was already ten minutes late. I was so embarrassed. Off to a great start!

New Ph.D. program site at MSU College of Education

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A day or so ago, Adam of Envision Internet Consulting released a new website for a graduate program in Education at Michigan State University.

The program is the Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy Ph.D. Program at the MSU College of Education.

The new site took a lot of work and I think it looks great. It also exemplifies many web standards and accessibility practices.

Congratulations to the people at the MSU College of Education and Adam!

(Now if only the main MSU College of Ed website would step up…)

I’m geeked

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My department at MSU had a day celebrating 50 years of computing at MSU. So, in the MSU Computer Store, there was a Mac II plugged in and running, tiny monochromatic monitor and all.

I couldn’t help but look, and lo and behold, the hard drive had TeachText and NCSA Mosaic, the first publically available web browser, on it. When I started Mosaic, it had the date on the startup screen: 10-29-1993.

So, I wrote a web page in TeachText, welcoming people to the Computer Store and our 50 years celebration, and then viewed it in Mosaic. And then I annotated it using using the Mac’s audio-recording (which worked great, by the way).

I’m not the nostalgiac type, but it was weird. The very first web page I wrote, ever, I wrote with TeachText, and the first web browser I ever used was Mosaic on a Mac. It really took me back.

Writing markup with TeachText and seeing it render in Mosaic are the seeds of my life as a professional web developer. It seems so very long ago.