Where am I now?

Accomplishments- I am pretty accomplished as a professional. My skills are in demand and I run the flash development for a work group that is pretty diverse and has diverse clients. I can go a bit further play with new technologies.
I am getting to do what I love - creating games (if only a single game at the moment). I am studying innovation studies to learn more about how to make changes to the world. I have reached over a million people with the educational software I have worked on. I have had my software receive numerous awards.

Setbacks -I have also unfortunately seen my software misused - it has been sold to the state college system and is being used to teach adults without any teacher intervention for math. The product in question was designed to be a supplement for grade school students to practice skills they already have been taught and to help teachers know exactly what areas were troubling for students. Telling a student to simply sit in a lab for an entire semester and keep trying and looking at the same examples (even if the problems are randomly generated based on sound testing principles) is horrible and counterproductive. My mother-in-law is scared to return and is going to take an outside course in math before she tries to make up her incomplete.

My years of work on the MERET project are being wasted by bureaucracy. They are taking all of these free to the public modules and putting them behind a pay to access wall. The mother and infant modules in particular are highly inappropriate for this. Despite my pleas to have the payment be contingent upon them wanting continuing education credits or to at least try it with only a module or two they are insisting on removing these modules from the public domain and trying to make them pay. Our traffic count is much too low as things are and now we are turning our back on serving the public and instead are trying to fatten our coffers with a plan that is never likely to yield anywhere near the amount it will cost to implement (but as it is carry-over funds who cares... its only from the government). Ah where do these deficits come from? Shortsighted thinking like this. So we remove modules with great information on postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis, and caring for infants and mothers during a disaster and put them where no one will see them. I feel violated this is not what I signed up for - what about the School's mission to help the community?

Where do I want to go? I would like to get the graduation thing over with. I would like to look at a good PhD program perhaps in innovation studies. I would like to get more involved in 3d immersive worlds like Second Life. I have enjoyed my contacts with the developers from Chicago who are doing simulations inside Second Life. I hope to be doing a bit of work with CADE as time goes on - it is nice to meet fellow senior developers we had some interesting methodology chats.

What does it really mean? As an avenue for communication it is crying out in the darkness of cyberspace. Unless you light a candle to guide people to your site it is likely that the tree will fall unheard in the woods. In some ways that is nice - you get to shout and most likely no one will hear but then again perhaps they shall. I think as a method of communicating it is definitely different. It is interesting that blogs are yet another sign of our times where people choose to talk through a computer rather than to anyone. What does it mean? Perhaps we are just alot less friendly than we once were.

The new job requires alot of diversity in technology so I will have to come up to speed pretty fast. Perhaps Lynda.com is a good solution. We will see I am trying out one of their Flash training series in order to bone up on the AS 2.0 standard. While I enjoy more structured languages I have been using AS 1.0 for so long that it will take a bit of getting used to.

Hmm speaking of academia I had better start trying to get all my ducks in a row for graduation. I need to get my thesis gameplan well thought out and moving forward. Hopefully this will be my last class of required courses so I can merely take the rest for the joy of it :). Life as a U employee will certainly involve alot of classes I just wonder which I should choose. The choice of whether to go PhD I will hold off on for a bit until I am a tad closer on my thesis plans.