Folks who know me from podcasting might not know that I’m a teacher. Listeners who know me from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper might not know about Tales from the Lammas Wood. Some of you may know me as a teacher or as an expert in web accessibility or … well, you get the idea.

Hello, World. Glad you stopped by to see what’s happening here.

In 2009, my friend Mur Lafferty challenged me to complete NaNoWriMo in half a month. For the un-initiated, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month and it falls in November each year. To win, write at least 50,000 words of a new extended work of fiction starting at midnight on the morning of November 1 and ending at midnight in the evening of November 30. For most normal purposes, 50,000 words is a rather long novella or a rather short novel, but it’s a handy target and every year thousands of erstwhile novelists from around the globe pit themselves against their keyboards and the clock.

In 2007, I completed the first draft of South Coast in November and had the podcast out by Christmas. In 2008, I failed to break the 2,000 word mark because of day job conflicts–travel, new high-priority projects, etc. In 2009, I accepted Mur’s challenge and the result was the first draft of Ravenwood. The first of what I hope will be a new series of works set in a fantasy setting.

Why fantasy?

2009 was the year of The Challenge with NaNoWriMo. After I accepted the speed challenge from Mur, another friend challenged me to get out of my genre and write a fantasy work while a long time beta reader finally nailed me down to write a female lead character. Little did I know how much of a challenge it would be, or how much fun I’d have working in this new country.

Keeping with my idea of twisting tropes, I approached the Epic Quest Fantasy by first identifying the things I wanted to change. In the typical story, the kid leaves home to seek fame and fortune (or escape the boredom of the farm) and adventures across the land becoming a hero and gaining powers as they go. So, I wanted to tell the story of an older person on a quest to find a place to settle down and write her magnum opus — a book on the collected herb lore collected from a lifetime on the road. The result is Tanyth Fairport – a wandering herbalist in the autumn of her years in search of the last of the keepers of the Old Knowledge.

I had so much fun with this book, I can hardly wait to get back into the world.

In January, 2007, I sat down at my word processor to see if I could write a novel-length work of science fiction. I was tired of the save-the-universe stories where the hero was a king or the captain of the ship. I wanted to know what that famous red-shirted crewman did before he got sent on the Away Team and killed. I wanted to think about what it would do to our vision of the universe if we sent out freighters instead of frigates, sent an airline and not an air force.

The result is The Golden Age of the Solar Clipper.

The main narrative consists of the Trader’s Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper. All six books in the series are available at Podiobooks.com or as free audio downloads on the iTunes music store.

Currently, I’m working on Cape Grace — the sequel to South Coast, book one in a spin off series that explores the life of a South Coast shaman.

Over the years, I’ve been honored with six Parsec Award finalists and in 2011 I became the first person to win back-to-back Parsec Awards in the Long Form category for Owner’s Share.

One of the axioms at Podiobooks is that everybody hates the sound of their own voice. The dichotomy between what you hear in your head when you speak and the actual sound that gets recorded and played back sets up a “this just ain’t right” loop in most folks. Imagine my surprise when people started asking me to lend my voice to their projects.

I’ve had parts in so many different productions, I’m not sure I can retrieve them all any more, but I’ve started compiling the list of narrations and voice acting.

In 2004 the University of Northern Colorado bestowed a Ph.D. in Educational Technology on me. I specialized in distance education, interactive media, and instructional design.

Distance education is a personal mission. In my 20s I got out of the Coast Guard and tried to get a diploma. In rural Maine, that was a difficult proposition unless you live very near to a campus. I was able to start a degree in computer science in the mid 70s but had to drop out as the demands of family, work, and transportation made that untenable. It was over a decade before I was able to start again. Today the distance education landscape has changed dramatically. The internet provides the channel for thousands of colleges, high schools, and even elementary schools to deliver educational experiences almost anywhere. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that these experiences are bound by Sturgeon’s Law which might be the best scientific evidence we have for placing Education on the side of Art in the Art-or-Science debate. The issue is that few teachers have sufficient expertise to use online tools with the same facility (or effectiveness) that they have with classroom based tools. More, there is little incentive for them to gain the skills. That’s my mission. To help teachers teach better–particularly online.

Toward that end, I’m very interested in the processes of learning. If we, as teachers, do not understand what happens when people learn, then our teaching becomes an exercise in whistling in the dark. Many people believe that we understand how learning works but the reality is we only have some models that suggest what might be happening in that black-box known as the mind. From the earliest days of Behaviorism and Operant Conditioning to the current models of Constructivism, Constructionism, and Connectivism, educators have been trying to get a grip on what happens in the mind when people learn.

A key piece – for me – is exploring how adults gain knowledge. We don’t stop learning when we leave school. Most people keep learning. As civilization adjusts to the new modalities brought about by the globalization of business, art, and science, we’re at one of the crossroads of the planet’s history. Much as the world changed during the last great epochs — Stone, Bronze, Iron, Agriculture, Industry — we’re on the cusp of a rapidly changing collection of technologies which I believe future generations will point out as the beginning of the next great epoch.

I teach part time at Morehead State University in Morehead, KY, as adjunct instructor for the Educational Technology program in the Department of Foundational and Graduate Studies in Education. I specialize in distance education and educational media. One of the lessons I try to teach is that distance ed is not — as so many believe — any where/any time, but rather everywhere, all the time. The truth is that learning can’t wait for education’s schedule. How we adjust to that in the middle of this century will largely define how well — or if — we survive to the end of it.

For thirteen years I worked in the field loosely known as accessibility. My job was technologies coordinator for the National Center on Severe and Sensory Disabilities at the University of Northern Colorado. I started in 1999 as a graduate assistant helping to build the first online master’s degree in education for the blind. The project crew from a Western Regional Governor’s program to a national scope with the help of earmark funding from the U.S. Congress.

I found the challenge of creating meaningful educational experiences for students or are blind or visually impaired to be at once overwhelming and exhilarating. The internet is – at its core – a graphic environment. For people who can’t see it, it’s still an amazingly powerful tool–one with the ability to break down walls of prejudice, stereotype, and isolation. There’s an apocryphal cartoon about “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” For us, the moment came when a teacher who was herself blind told us, “This is the first semester I didn’t have to get somebody to read the papers for me.”

Along the way I helped develop some tools.

Web Enabled Simulated Braille (WESBraille) is a tool to help sighted teachers get enough practice to become proficient in braille without overwhelming a braille instructor. It grew out of our need to provide high quality braille instruction at a distance and lets students practice braille drills online using only a web browser and a normal keyboard.

Accessibility continues to be an issue with education’s growing interest in distance delivery and with leveraging internet technologies to reach out to tuition-paying students.