Changing tenure and promotion standards – JITP Online Journal

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Finally, the article that I submitted on “Establishing a New Paradigm: The call to reform the tenure and promotion standards for digital media faculty” premiered today in the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. The focus of the article is to illustrate the challenges facing digital media faculty as they march towards tenure and promotion, and present a case for reform of the current system. The article was a deeply personal research project for me as it chronicled my journey through the tenure system at LaGuardia.

The introduction for the journal prominently featured a brief editorial review of my article that was rather positive. “Establishing a New Paradigm” was described as showing “how the tenure and promotion processes for most faculty working and publishing with digital technologies are ill-suited to recognize, reward, and nurture the intellectual and scholarly activities that such academics must undertake to stay abreast of rapid changes in their fields”. I was elated that the editors thought that I argued “forcefully that the academy must adapt its employment structures to more explicitly support and reward precisely the type of work that lies at the heart of the other three pieces in this issue”. I have to admit that those words brought a smile to my face.

A digital copy of just my article on tenure and promotion reform can be found here in pdf format.

The new baby

I just got the new Acer Aspire V3-771G-9875 17.3-Inch laptop I ordered as an early birthday present to myself. I bought it online from Amazon for a great price. My 2009 17 inch Macbook Pro was starting to show it’s age with the old Intel Core 2 Duo processor powering it. I was starting to worry that my Macbook  was going to have problems dealing with the new Adobe CS6 software suite, especially the video based applications like After Effects and Premiere Pro. So I put on my big boy pants and finally pulled the trigger on a new Acer system.

 

Now for the record I am not happy that I have switched from Macs back to the darkside, but this laptop was too good to pass up. I love my macs but the new systems are priced too high when compared to some Windows systems. The desktop system that I built a few months back had made me more comfortable about switching to Continue reading “The new baby”

Microsoft IT Tech Trends Speech

The footage above is the actual video of the speech that I gave to a group of High School juniors and seniors during the Microsoft sponsored IT Tech Trends seminar earlier this month. The purpose of the seminar was to get high school students interested in IT careers. While it wasn’t my finest speech (I rambled a little bit), overall I think I did okay. The students seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say.

Microsoft IT Tech Trends Seminar

Alfred Thompson, Academic Relations Manager for Microsoft

After my morning class the LaGuardia CIS department hosted an IT Tech Trends seminar yesterday that was sponsored by Microsoft. The seminar was open to high school juniors and seniors from the NYC area with the express purpose of getting them interested in IT careers in general, and IT studies at LaGuardia specifically. One of the schools that had confirmed backed out at the last minute because the coordinator had confused the dates and had booked parent-teacher conferences on the same day. The turn out, while not as big as we had originally expected, was still respectable. Continue reading “Microsoft IT Tech Trends Seminar”