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Brief Vita

I'm currently a teacher of Literature and advanced technology at a nonpublic independent school. Before teaching high school, I taught literature and composition to undergraduate students at a college and a university.

My professional experience in information technology started in 1994 as I took on webmaster responsibilities for a nonprofit organization. Soon after, I began designing and deploying databases, first for nonprofit media outlets, then for my department in graduate school through 2006.

I took on webmaster responsibilities for the college of arts and sciences at my university, until I ultimately became system administrator for our Center for Literary Computing, where I administered Solaris and Irix machines. I was very proud to have integrated Macs, Windows PCs, and the two servers using smb.

I subsequently designed and maintained the department website at the college where I taught, until taking a position as Instructional Technologist for the college. While working in this capacity, I became increasingly frustrated with closed source solutions and with the vendor lock that resulted from it.

I began experimenting with Linux distributions in 1996. In 2005, I began relying solely on Ubuntu on my spare boxes. After I began teaching advanced technology, my students built a new machine for me; at this point I began using Ubuntu on my main computer. I subsequently moved all my home machines to Ubuntu.

Technology Instruction

In my role as an information systems management instructor, I've worked together with teams of high school students to contribute to the FOSS community. We worked together to build virtual appliances based on Ubuntu in general, and specifically on TurnKey Linux distributions.

In November 2010 we placed bronze in TurnKey Linux's international development [http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/contest-winners contest], which recognized our contributions to TKL, and gave us an opportunity to celebrate that three of our appliances had been adopted by TKL and would be incorporated into their appliance library. As we've been reminded by developers, our contributions are not only to TurnKey Linux, but to the projects as well. After UDS 2010, we committed ourselves to the https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Education/EdubuntuServer project discussed at UDS. Together, we've worked to create TKLPatches for as many of the appliances as possible on the https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Education/EdubuntuServer.

Appliance Contributions

• Ampache
• Elgg

• LimeSurvey

• Elgg
• IEP-IPP
• Mahara
• OpenSIS