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Thoughts on Black History Month

Black History Month is here again and I find myself reflecting on how things have changed in just a few short years. For example, the story behind the above picture is that a little Black child visited the White House wanted to know if Obama’s hair “felt like his”, so the president obliged and let him see for himself. This brought to mind an exchange that my son and I had during the last primary season in 2008, before Obama was elected.

I took my son with me to vote, and as we were in the booth, he asked if he could grow up to become President one day. Now as a Black father this was one of those pivotal moments where you have to make a decision whether to tell him the truth about the world as you believe it, or allow them to remain innocent for awhile longer by painting them a picture of how the world should be. I try to always be truthful with my children, but in this moment I paused and decided to tell him how I hoped the future would look. “Yes, you can become the President one day”.

I just never thought it would happen in my lifetime.

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HTML5 Cheat Sheets

Some of you might remember that I took an HTML5 and CSS3 training class at Noble Desktop a few months back. The class made me acutely aware of how important the newest version of HTML will be terms of web design, video streaming and mobile application development in the future. I came across the following HTML5 cheat sheets designed by InMotion Hosting and figured I would share these documents Continue reading “HTML5 Cheat Sheets”

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Mobile App Training with AS3 and Adobe AIR

One of the areas in new media that is experiencing phenomenal growth is mobile app development. Students see a large audience using smartphones and tablets, and as developers and entrepreneurs they want in on the market. I can’t blame them. I want in as well. Truth The money is good and the future for mobile devises is very strong. Due to the pressure of meeting my academic commitments I have been putting off training in mobile app development for the past year. Part of the issue was finding a quality school that teaches the material I needed at a reasonable price. This was Continue reading “Mobile App Training with AS3 and Adobe AIR”

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Presentation: Creating a CUNY-wide approach towards Digital Media Programs

The above video was from a presentation and panel discussion held at John Jay College’s 10th Annual City University of New York (CUNY) IT Conference. The emerging nature of Digital Media has challenged the ability of universities to adapt to a rapidly changing landscape. Due to the evolution of these new disciplines, and the speed in which cross-disciplinary technical innovations are implemented in programs with a digital media focus, very few universal standards are in place for instruction and assessment.

In order to set the stage for the panel discussion, my presentation focused on what I believe are some of the major issues facing digital media programs within CUNY. The panel group, assembled from my colleagues from various CUNY institutions, discussed specific strategies that the university could implement to prepare our digital media programs for the future.

Panel participants included:

Continue reading “Presentation: Creating a CUNY-wide approach towards Digital Media Programs”

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Presentation: Motivating Students to Succeed

LaGuardia’s Center for Teaching and Learning is currently sponsoring a New Faculty Colloquium. The New Faculty Colloquium is a year-long seminar designed to acclimate new faculty to the institution and to acquaint them with various pedagogical approaches to teaching. I was asked to present some of my recently published findings on motivating Black and Hispanic students to a new cohort of LaGuardia faculty. While the research for my presentation Continue reading “Presentation: Motivating Students to Succeed”

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LaGuardia Event: Ryan Charles speaks

Over the past few months I have been working with Janice Karlen, a colleague of mine from the LaGuardia Business and Technology Department, to arrange for a guest speaker to come in and speak to our students. Janice thought it would be a great idea to collaborate on a joint event since there is a natural synergy between the Business and Technology and the New Media Technology students. As a result of Janice’s connections we were lucky enough to secure Ryan Charles, the Co-Founder of Consmr.com and former head of mobile strategy at Zagat. Ryan was Continue reading “LaGuardia Event: Ryan Charles speaks”

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Launch

So last night I get in late from teaching an evening class and my son meets me at the door in damn near a panic. He tells me they are finalizing the pre-order sales for “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3” right now and we have to get to Gamestop so that we can get in line number for the 12am launch. Now keep in mind that I was hungry and tired before I started earlier teaching that evening, so at this point this is the last thing I wanted to hear. Son or not I almost told Continue reading “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Launch”

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HTML 5 and CSS 3 Training Class

In order to enhance the knowledge that I acquired in January when I took the WordPress theme design class at Noble Desktop,  I decided to sign up for an HTML5 and CSS3 course. The industry is rapidly moving towards these new standards due to the advanced feature sets in HTML5 and CSS3 which allows for advanced animation, as well as for audio and video files to natively be supported in the browser without the need for third party plug-ins like Adobe’s Flash. While I didn’t feel like spending the money for the class, I needed to get up to speed on the new standards in order update the LaGuardia New Media curriculum, and to complete a much needed design update to my own web site. The class was once again held at Noble Desktop, and was once again, led by an amazing teacher named Victoria Torres. The two day course took us through the process of building an site from scratch using these new standards.

One of the unforeseen benefits of the class was that HTML 5 and CSS 3, when used in conjunction with a new mobile framework called PhoneGap, is becoming an excellent way of building mobile applications for both Android and iOS devises. PhoneGap was recently purchased by Adobe and was integrated into the latest version of Dreamweaver, release 5.5. This is a huge development for me since I can leverage our existing curriculum and begin to instruct students in the basics of mobile application develop by using PhoneGap.

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The 2011 NYC Comic Con

The NYC Comic-Con was in town so the kids and I engaged in our yearly ritual. They had been looking forward to it since we went last year. The wife tagged along again for her second year. She will never admit it but I think she is starting to enjoy the madness as well. The kids had a blast as usual.

I was shocked how many people that ran into at the event that I knew from academia and business. I guess being a nerd is no longer a bad thing. The photos from the weekend can be found below….. Continue reading “The 2011 NYC Comic Con”