As a graduating student, you are to construct a portfolio. Your portfolio should include 5-7 double-spaced pages (Does not include title page, table of content, and bibliography). The primary audience for your portfolio is your 490 professor. Below is the direction.
1) Title page and Annotated Table of Contents.
The title page should include your name, major, email address and date of submission. The Table of Contents should communicate careful and logical organization and enable readers to find materials easily.
2) List of all courses you have taken/are currently taking.
This should be organized in the following manner:
Area I: UWM Distribution Requirements — General Education
Area II: BSIR Core Courses
Area III: BSIR Cross-functional Electives
Area IV: General Electives, including Cognate Areas of Study
3) You as a learner
Using specific details and with reference to a variety of texts and experiences, you are to examine your educational experience as a college student and to create a meaningful statement of your learning. In particular you are asked to discuss how your learning is integrative and to discuss work in your concentration.
In this section you need to address these questions:
(1) how have you developed as a learner/thinker;
(2) What have you learned in BSIR major; and
(3) how has your experience been integrative (Integrative: What connections or contrasts have you found among and between ideas and experiences in your learning communities, courses, and experiential learning, etc.?)
4) Discuss competencies pertinent to your BSIR major and/or experience
You are to select 4 competencies that are especially important to you. Define each competency and explain how the competency is relevant to your major or experience. You may want to discuss some of the specific skills and abilities that make up each competency.
5) Future directions
This section should include the following components:
(1) a statement of approximately 2 paragraphs explaining your degree program in integrative studies.
(2) Your updated resume, carefully written and designed, accompanied by a brief statement explaining the target audience for which you have shaped this particular version of your resume.
(3) Statement of career and personal goals as you see them currently.
(4) Future learning in a competency area. Questions you might consider:
((A) What are some of your learning goals, short-term and longer-term?
((B) What are your current goals for graduate school or career?
((C) What are some personal goals (for example, goals connected to travel or to competencies such as effective citizenship, global perspective or valuing)?
6) Bibliography
In your essays, you will need to refer specifically to sources such as books, journal articles, lecture notes, etc. Please be sure to cite these in appropriate format.
OBJECTIVE – I am primarily interested in working for the common good, and towards a just and sustainable future. My ideal position would utilize my facility for, and enjoyment of, working with & serving others, researching & structuring information, design, teaching, a user’s perspective, creating tutorials & S.O.P. checklists, and the joy I take in talking to people about the things that really matter to them.
WORK EXPERIENCE:
Self Employed 1990 – Present Allness Unlimited
Web design and site maintenance, structural painting and restoration, woodworking, arts, crafts, jewelry, and other creative pursuits.
Webmaster 04/2004 – 09/2006 UCSB Milwaukee, WI
Maintaining and updating the web publication, Himalayan Linguistics Journal for the Linguistics Departments of UCSB and UWM.
Instructor’s Assistant Spring Semester 2004 UWM Milwaukee, WI
Research and paperwork for a School of Information Studies instructor.
Water Treatment 6/00 – 1/01 Institech / ITU New Berlin, WI
Waste water flotation treatment and recycling operation, forklift certification, maintenance, some welding.
Bartender 12/01-2/02 Clique Soul Club Milwaukee, WI
01/01-9/01 Shanahan’s Irish Pub Milwaukee, WI
Injection Mold Setup 6/99 -12/99 Interplas Ltd. Menomonee Falls, WI
Mold Set-up: Setting and pulling small quick-change molds, process troubleshooting, repair and maintenance of water thermal regulation systems.
9/98-9/99 Generation 2 Plastics Milwaukee, WI
Setting molds, some fabrication and maintenance, supervising second shift production, production reports, creating process S.O.P. checklists, W-2 client training in mold operation and inspection. Audits. Recycled polypropylene material extrusion. Melt flow tests. Densification. Forklift. Materials blending and sorting.
EDUCATION:
2007 University Wisconsin Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI
Information and Library Science
2000 Wisconsin Bartending College Milwaukee, WI
Bar Tending
1985-1988 University of Wisconsin Madison, WI
History, Anthropology, Political Science
1984-1985 Academy Of Health Science/National Guard San Antonio, TX
Basic Medical Laboratory 92B BML10
RECENT VOLUNTEERISM:
Milwaukee Area Green Party – 1998-2007, Co-ordinating Council member for 5 years
WI Green Party – 2003-Present, Co-ordinating Council Rep for the 4th, 5th, and 3rd Cong. Districts since 2003
US Green Party – 2004-Present, National Committee Rep for the 3rd Congressional District since 2007
Feed the Need Necedah and NecedahHarvest.org – 2008-Present, Steering committee, Webmaster, and Activist, for local food security and buy local efforts
INTERESTS:
Joomla & Drupal CMS, all sciences, reading, history, aquaria, art painting, computers, infognostics, interdisciplinary fields of study generally, especially Archeaology, and new paradigms of connectivity.
The reverence of Allness through seeking sustainability and grace in human affairs is essential in all I do.
References:
RECENT SUPERVISORS:
Michael Noonan, Professor of Linguistics, Dept. of English UWM
Wooseob Jeong, Assistant Professor, UWM SOIS
ACADEMIC:
Johannes Britz, D.D., D. Phil., Dean & Professor UWM SOIS
Jacques du Plessis, Professor UWM SOIS
Pa Moua (Paj Muas), ME-PD, Student Adviser
FRIENDS:
Mark E Sarvela, Program Evaluation Manager Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare, DHFS – DCFS
Gregory H. Bartz, NASA Flight Management Subcontractor
Anna R. Olson, Creative Director, Cream City Ribbon
Literature and Politics: Religious & Moral Perspectives of the 19th & 20th Centuries
3
:
ILS 202
BC
Integrated Liberal Studies; Western Culture: History of Science, Technology, & Philosophy II
3
TRAN-L&S XS
:
LIT TRAN 262
B
Survey Of Chinese Literature
3
COMPLIT X 3.00
AFROAMER 277
B
Africa: An Introductory Survey
4
AFRICOL 232
E ASIAN 240
A
Introduction to the I-Ching: Book Of Change
2
TRAN-L&S
PHILOS 204
B+
Introduction to Asian Religions
3
:
SPANISH 101
F
First Year Spanish
0
SPANISH 103
Course Topic(s): Chinese Calligraphy
PEACEST 201
Introduction to Peace Studies & Conflict Resolution
3
2003-05-28 Deans Honor List
2004-01-06 Deans Honor List
My Learning Prior to SOIS at UWM:
My concentration has been on political science and studies of cultures.
There have been many opportunities for me to integrate my focus on the needs of citizens, whilst pursuing my SOIS studies.
Within SOIS I have focused a few graduate courses on library science, so one could easily say I have concentrated on the citizen need for information resources and how it can best be filled with our current capabilities. I have focused much study on the optimal future development of information resources for public use into the future.
There are several competencies that it has served me well to study; many of the most useful come from the second half of my academic career, when I’ve studied IR at UWM SOIS. The foundation upon which that course of study was laid was half a lifetime’s self directed study on the historical issues of the people in politics, and the possibilities that our technical development can and does open up for a more human future. The core of this study is the first half of my academic career; I particularly was left an impression on by a handful of these classes. Although the mists of time deprive me of much detail, I will start with the classes from my classic liberal arts / humanities phase.
First chapter highlights start with Ancient Cities of the Americas, Anthro 22. Although I can’t remember the professor’s name, he was a giant in his field and had been in charge of the digs at Teotehuacan and Cahokia, each for extended critical periods of time. He taught no more soon after that (1985), and was so old he was difficult to hear, but he put me on to a very important concept that is still having a hard time being accepted as the new paradigm. He told me, in trying to make sense of some details, or another, that there was much circumstantial evidence for many ancient American cities that tells a similar tale.
These city states all developed very complex hierarchies. These tended to grow over time, and eventually become too large and top heavy to be supported by those below. At this point they would eat up all their reserves, and hinterlands. Then when nothing could keep it working, the culture would collapse completely. As there would be no food anywhere nearby, the entire culture of that place would disappear, and the survivors would simply found a new, more egalitarian way of life somewhere else. He was quite convincing with this case using Cahokia, where he was the prominent expert in the field, and the evidence is quite strong now that this was the case. The Teotehuacan hierarchy may have survived somewhat transmuted as the Aztec, or some other aristocracy, its case is not so cut and dried. He hinted that the Maya may also prove to be a similar case, and since he has left us, the case has become pretty solid that the Maya just threw the culture away but are still using many of the same walled orchards, built long ago, today.
This gives me much hope, for I saw us as more like the Cahokian model, but without the ability to escape back to the hinterland and the wilderness. Our culture is so profoundly large, and impacts this planet so universally, that this class helped me see another way that we are meeting a grave new challenge never seen before. Next social collapse, there will be nowhere to leave to. This paradigm also pointed out the degree to which our culture has a built in addiction to frontiers, and that the frontier of human endeavor had transformed historically with the close the physical frontier of earth’s lands.
This lesson was bolstered by my simultaneously taking Anthro 101, and was thrown in sharp contrast by Intro to International Relations (the other IR), Poli Sci 175. A professor whose name I prefer to forget thought that the concept of hegemony was deep, and important, and the greatest thing since sliced bread. I may have been more inclined to agree with him were his intent to teaching hegemony less akin to Kissinger’s intent in practicing it. This semester is when I discovered my true enemy was hierarchal socio-political power, not the hierarchy itself, but the concept of its legitimacy.
So that was my first semester at UWM, formative. Then I went to Madison.
There were four courses that had a great impact on me individually, and one semester when three courses combined to cover the three sides of the golden triangle. These all were part of my focus on the political history of the peoples of our world.
The two most important of these seven were focused on biology and the history of science.
The first of the four was Poli Sci 209, Issues in Political Thought. The issue for the semester was the history of words used to identify political ideologies. In this class I came to understand that disparate modern ideologies had all started as something that I believed in strongly, but that over time the vagaries of political power had twisted the discourse until it was impossible to use these words to have meaningful discussion of the concepts that they represent. This is because they each have so many different meanings to different people. It helped me understand how skewed modern American political discourse is, and why it is so difficult to discuss politics meaningfully in the US. This formed the basis of my ability to define my very simple anarkic beliefs, regardless of my audiences’ understanding of ideological terms.
The theme of Chinese, and Asian religious cultures, that also spanned these years, contributed much to my ability to discuss my spiritual beliefs, which were emerging from my atheism at the same time.
The other Poli Sci course that had great impact was Poli Sci 654, Politics of Revolution. I’d always wanted to see myself as a revolutionary, this course helped me sort thru what is wrong and what is right with the revolutions that have occurred so far. One of the best parts of it was that we looked closely at what causes revolution; what factors were always present, and which, not being present, prevent effective change regardless of the need. The perception of the possibility of positive change appears to be the most important predisposition towards people changing their world. This concept has had a profound impact on me and it has grown stronger and more refined over time.
Two science courses had a profound impact on me in ways that go beyond science to political and spiritual understandings that have remained important to me. The prior semester had laid some foundations for this. Three classes covered different sides of the infamous golden triangle at the same time; this really helped me achieve a good overview of modern western history. Poli Sci 260, Intro to Latin America, and Afroamer 277 Intro to Africa really helped me understand how eurocentric culture has in fact created underdevelopment, and that it is sustained by the state department and other institutions that have inherited the mantle of the wealth and power of the eurocentric economic worldview. The other class I had that semester is hard to describe, for it was an interdisciplinary look at the evolution of western culture, science, technology, and philosophy. Integrated Liberal Studies 202 II was full of expansive ideas and charted the interrelation of what we see as different fields of study, and how they have become fragmented over time. All three of these classes spent the same two weeks on the period of the golden triangle. At the end of this time I realized that I had acquired a quite a broad and comprehensive view of western history, from within it’s philosophical core, and in it’s context of other cultures.
The take home lesson for this semester: when an ancient Greek used the word teknos, he was discussing not only how, and with what, but also why. We have divorced our reason from itself; we do not ask why we design science, technology, and philosophy. They have all become ancillaries to earning money, which motive is unquestioned. That this is the essential goal of our culture (earning more money for/by those who already have much of it), and our biggest barrier to good politics, science, and technology, was beginning to become apparent to me, but it was the history of science that straightened me out for good. I clearly remember History of Science 101, but my transfer transcripts contain no reference to it. It was near the end of this class, which was a broad overview of the rise of modern science over the last few centuries, that I realized that a good portion of the technical difficulties we are having with survival on earth has come from a changing of the priorities and motives for science, research, and technical development over the years.
What originally was a grand enterprise to improve the human condition and grow closer to God by understanding his world better has become mainly harnessed to the capitalist profit motive. There are many small reasons for this, and collectively they are quite substantial. This changed my core understanding, until then I saw all political problems as essentially being solvable by technical solutions.
Now I see that all technical problems require political solutions.
Information Resources at SOIS UWM, and My Four Core Competencies:
This brings me to the second half of my course work, a focus on the teknos of solutions to political problems. Entering the SOIS, I had the advantage of seeing technology not as object, but as process implying a purpose. I also had the advantage of knowing the power of information and knowledge to transform our world, as well as knowing the importance information access for everyone has to the world. Though I could only see at the time that I would rather study information use generally than any given field, I have found in IR studies the answers the first half of my studies had sent me looking for.
I felt simultaneously well updated and at home in my first semester back at UWM, in the IR program at SOIS. In L&I SCI 632 and L&I SCI 110 there was much discussion about the ethics of information use. We covered the need for intellectual property security, and the digital divide. These discussions helped bring my focus on socio-political issue back into focus. Class discussion in these classes did more to help me comprehend the current state of these issues more than any other materials could have. These two classes rounded out the competency I brought back to school with me. This is a basic, broad humanities background with a view of the context of our past, but a focus on current and future needs. I have rounded out this competency with the addition of PEACEST 201, Intro to Conflict Resolution, we studied conflict and it’s resolution. There was a real relevance here in that the digital divide and the information economy were important topics of the class. William Ury’s “Getting to Peace” was an excellent text that put a larger context to our cultural development. His essential argument was that we have returned to the expandable economic pie of our ancestors who were hunter-gatherers as a result of the knowledge economy. He places blame for violence amongst humans largely on the limited economic resources of the agricultural revolution. Like a hunter gather economy, but more so, the resources that matter in the knowledge revolution expand when shared, instead of shrinking like land and water do when shared. Ury is famous for his work as a corporate consultant and mediator. This socio-economic competence is formative and central to me. There are three other competencies that I value very much, it is easier to discuss them while discussing the second half of my course work, which is mostly in IR. In a word each: research, project management, and web implementation. My preexisting artistic bent has enjoyed flourishing particularly in web implementation and design.
The core competency that I value having expanded in SOIS, is the ability to do research. In L&I Sci. 210, Foundations of University Library Research, I learned how to research and document a good college paper. I had acquired a pretty good sense for how to write a paper, but this course covers material every student should know about how to use reference materials better to do research and to document it.
In L&I SCI 330, Electronic Info Retrieval, and L&I SCI 510, Intro to Reference Services and Resources, my ability to do research was expanded and solidified. The ability to find the information one needs is the most important skill today in my opinion. In all three of these course’s, databases, the Internet, and practice, were far more powerful than any books that could have been assigned. The familiarity I gained with the use of a reference library is invaluable to me, and was given uncommon depth, for a baccalaureate, by the addition of L&I SCI 681, Using Archives: The Value of Primary Sources in the Information Age. This course is about managing and organizing archives. One of its focuses was about basic marketing issues, this helped complete the course of thought began with L&I SCI 640, Information Marketing. This class was primarily about marketing information; the focus was on marketing free library resources to the public in an information economy. As this course was one of my first IR courses, it set a course of questioning that I followed throughout these following courses, comprising what I call the engineering, or development, competency.
One of the few courses that had books that I thought were instrumental to me was, L&I SCI 310, Human Factors of Info Seeking and Use. This course was essentially a study of usability. As someone who has an interest in universal info access, it was very instructive to study the methods of measuring and ameliorating usability problems. There were two books in this class that left an impression on me. The first was “Don’t Make Me Think”, almost a new type of book, being easy to skim and navigate; it was the best example I’ve ever seen for Steve Krug’s points about web design in book form. Donald Norman’s “Things that Make Us Smart” was all about how the focus of the information technology should be on conforming it to human needs, as opposed to the recent historical trend of adapting human behavior to the machines. To function, the knowledge economy technology needs to make us smarter. Tools that are not easily handled by the human mind don’t makes us smart as effectively.
To further bolster this engineering, or product development, focus, it was instructive to have three other courses in addition. L&I SCI 250, Internet Planning & Implementation, taught me how to build an enterprise scale intranet, and introduced the concept of project management, and working in groups. PM techniques were expanded upon and given depth and context in L&I SCI 340, Information Architecture II. Here we learned about basic PM tools and techniques. This was a good course for understanding information projects in the context of a modern corporate culture that is aware of the need for good project management. In L&I SCI 490, Senior Capstone, we put PM methods and tools into use in a group project of design and implementation of a scripted website.
The capstone class also capped off experience and formal study in the remaining competency, interactive web design and implementation. This is the competency that I most enjoy exercising and learning, because it satisfies my creative and artistic self. In L&S 110, we were introduced to HTML markup. I was delighted to design my first web page in this class, and this carried over into L&I SCI 240, Information Architecture I, where we learned a lot about HTML and learned some JavaScript as well. We also learned about CSS and other kinds of templates. L&I SCI 440, Information Architecture III, expanded this scripting background; we designed ASP and PHP interactive web applications that worked with databases. There were several good texts covered in these courses, but the best sources were web based, like Webmonkey.com, and W3C pages.
Future Directions:
Designing web implementations gave me ideas that may bring all these competencies back together. I am working out some ideas I have for how web applications can be used to automate some of the work of group self governance. On the surface the concept is no more than a survey, but it is hyper survey. A web application could make it much easier, and more democratic, to share opinions and decisions. Just for beginners, we could rank the questions to order them by value, and share each other’s answers. Most important, the web environment will enable more ease of rewording of proposed questions and the posting new questions by participants. All in all, there is much room to improve communication, expression, and decisions, on political matters in the online environment. There are security issues that I find hard to solve simply, without the use of nominal Paypal payments, or some other such conceptually inappropriate use, but they are not intractable to a fair solution, and new solutions will arise organically.
A similar idea is to use cooperative effort to compile useful link lists to serve the peoples’ expanding need for coherence in the flood of data. A multi-axis system of categories and rankings could be combined with user inputs and valuations. This could enable the finding, and listing, of links in a number of different criteria simultaneously, with a ranking along a spectrum of each criterion. In this way one could search for just the right level of knowledge at the intersection of several interests. Some of these axes (political radicalism, or left-right spectrum, as opposed to the freedom-safety spectrum, or scientific radical-conservative spectrum) would be more subjective and geared towards values, trust, and taste. XML, which was the topic of my independent study, L&I SCI 399, is a markup that would make a good platform core for these types of applications.
My focus on universal empowerment through knowledge access has been brought much empowerment itself, in the form of these three other competencies. Research, product development, and web implementation, are well bundled here to perform the job I have assigned myself. It is my job to help all I can to ensure that these possibilities are used to help us all, for our boat is now to small for us to survive historic levels of collective individual selfishness. The new frontier is knowledge automation, but good results there are right next door to everyone, truly this is a new kind of new frontier. Clearly this frontier is in many ways the most open ever in terms of possibilities. I have confidence in our ability to build a sustainable knowledge economy, for the possibilities are limited only by our imagination. Yet I am concerned, for Politics of Revolution has taught me that we will not change our ways unless we perceive that we are able, and there is much in our socio-economic system that argues that we are helpless before it. We are not, however, helpless before it, it is we. Whether we know, or care, or not, every one of us changes and defines our culture, every day.
Currently I see my future in self employment as a webmaster while also working in the non-profit sector and/or knowledge industry. It is my dream to work with the national Green Party web team while working for Google. In both cases I would seek to work on ideas like the two cited above. Ultimately I would like to work in consulting and as a webmaster, while creating a game site out of the Science Fiction Utopian novel I’ve been working on. I would like to find a way to express my artistic urges in the meantime, so I am thinking about studies in computer imagery. In the meantime I intend to spend my summer learning Macromedia.
Download Academic Portfolio 2005 as a .doc, .odt, .rtf, or .txt.
Primary interest is working for the common good towards a just and sustainable future.
Ideal position would utilize facility for, and joy taken in, working with & serving others, researching & structuring information, design, teaching, consideration of a user’s perspective, creating tutorials & S.O.P. checklists, and talking to people about the things that matter to them (that particular bouquet, of course, is unlikely).
WORK EXPERIENCE
Self Employed 1990 – Present Allness Unlimited
Web design and site maintenance, structural painting and restoration, woodworking, arts, crafts, jewelry, and other creative pursuits.
Webmaster 04/2004 – 09/2006 UCSB Milwaukee, WI
Maintaining and updating the web publication, Himalayan Linguistics Journal for the Linguistics Departments of UCSB and UWM.
Instructor’s Assistant Spring Semester 2004 UWM Milwaukee, WI
Research and paperwork for a School of Information Studies instructor.
Water Treatment 6/00 – 1/01 Institech / ITU New Berlin, WI
Waste water flotation treatment and recycling operation, forklift certification, maintenance, some welding.
Bartender 12/01-2/02 Clique Soul Club Milwaukee, WI
Bartender 01/01-9/01 Shanahan’s Irish Pub Milwaukee, WI
Injection Mold Setup 6/99 -12/99 Interplas Ltd. Menomonee Falls, WI
Mold Set-up: Setting and pulling small quick-change molds, process troubleshooting, repair and maintenance of water thermal regulation systems.
Injection Mold Setup 9/98-9/99 Generation 2 Plastics Milwaukee, WI
Setting molds, some fabrication and maintenance, supervising second shift production, production reports, creating process S.O.P. checklists, W-2 client training in mold operation and inspection. Audits. Recycled polypropylene material extrusion. Melt flow tests. Densification. Forklift. Materials blending and sorting.
EDUCATION
2007 University Wisconsin Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI
Information and Library Science
2000 Wisconsin Bartending College Milwaukee, WI
Bar Tending
1985-1988 University of Wisconsin Madison, WI
History, Anthropology, Political Science
1984-1985 Academy Of Health Science/National Guard San Antonio, TX
Basic Medical Laboratory 92B BML10
RECENT VOLUNTEERISM
Milwaukee Area Green Party – 1998-2007, Co-ordinating Council member for 5 years
WI Green Party – 2003-Present, Co-ordinating Council Rep for the 4th, 5th, and 3rd Cong. Districts since 2003
US Green Party – 2004-Present, National Committee Rep for the 3rd Congressional District since 2007
Feed the Need Necedah and NecedahHarvest.org – 2008-Present, Steering committee, Webmaster, and Activist, for local food security and buy local efforts
INTERESTS
Applied tertiary and secondary research, animation, Joomla & Drupal CMS, graphic & web design, all sciences, history, aquaria, art painting, computers, infognostics, automation, collaborative self governance, archives, reading, materials, biochemistry, music, interdisciplinary fields of study generally, especially Archeaology, and new paradigms of connectivity.
Reverence of Allness by seeking to sustain grace in human affairs is the essence of all acts that matter.
REFERENCES
Recent Supervisors:
Michael Noonan, Professor of Linguistics, Dept. of English UWM
Wooseob Jeong, Assistant Professor, UWM SOIS
Academic:
Johannes Britz, D.D., D. Phil., Dean & Professor UWM SOIS
Jacques du Plessis, Professor UWM SOIS
Pa Moua (Paj Muas), ME-PD, Student Adviser
Friends:
Mark E Sarvela, Program Evaluation Manager, Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare; DHFS – DCFS
Gregory H. Bartz, NASA Flight Management Subcontractor
Anna R. Olson, Creative Director, Cream City Ribbon
Contact information on request from geanark@gmail.com
I love being part of a team helping people. I like to learn. I want to learn more about animation, Drupal, Spanish, Dreamweaver, PHP, and all sciences and technology. I am very skilled at online research and am familiar with most computer user habits at most skill levels. I want to help make the information economy more accessible, friendly, knowledgeable, and diverse. Anything you do, can be done meta. Whatever you need done, I can learn about it, and how to research it, and find a way to make it easier to learn or do.
I am particularly interested in organizations, goods, and services that benefit the common good, particularly those marginalized by historical structures of institutions and culture. I like people, and I like working with, and serving, others.
I am always interested to know more about the overarching conceptual structure of knowledge, the development of new theories and methods for seeking better tools and paradigms to organize our understandings and our efforts. The development of theory, spirit, and paradigm, are of great interest to me, as is also the development of new toolage and method, how we each use these, and how they could be better understood, organized, or made available to create ease of use, productivity, and consensus. I enjoy learning new information, concepts, and skills, particularly using these to improve methods of learning and creating, to make any part of it all easier and more fun to use and share, for more and more people, to the benefit of all.
I hope to start a new career in enabling social, environmental, and/or information systems work. I would like to be learning more about Drupal, Spanish, LINUX and Chinese, and have begun working more in PHP and Macromedia. I have always loved painting and design, and I am working on a freeware project CD/site to enable free self help for Windows users. I have learned to love creating tutorials on rudimentary use of programming, web design, and self help, and have recently graduated my tech support skills to pro, as I’m at the point where it is not just bailing out those who love me, but also those nice people who I only know because paid me to come over and fix problems and explain how to avoid them.
No matter where my career may go, it is very likely that many of these pursuits will continue only on my own time. The information I find most interesting is inevitably that which I am using the most. It would be great if any of my recent interests were a good fit for my new career, but the career I really seek is one helping empower and bring together people and/or other beings with information. My
Breif History:
Soon after high school, I joined the National Guard, to train as a medical laboratory technician, and get help for paying for UW. I should have known, Army financing made it even harder to pay for school at UW. After working at many tasks, I eventually became an injection mold setup technician in the 90′s, and then a bartender, but my needs to create value, learn, share, and be creative, were not at all met by either task. My job as a waste-water floatation separation technician had taught me the feeling of creating real social and environmental value, as a bartender I could enjoy the sharing of information, services, and goods, but neither kind of work satisfied my deep seated need to enquire, learn, teach, and share information, knowledge, and wisdom. Eventually I was able to go back to UWM with help from my family, and am now about to graduate from UWM SOIS, with a BSIR.
My Degree:
My studies have attempted to cover the breadth of the development and structure of understanding generally and the way different approaches and understandings can come together to further our vision of ourselves, our surroundings, and the constraints of the material and social world, about as well as an undergraduate degree may. I am especially interested in which of these are things we can change for the better, and how would it make best sense to do so. I have remained somewhat weak in math, programming, languages, and business, much of what I know about science and art is self taught, but I have studied each of these enough to augment my core competency, which is how these are all connected in their past, future, and current development.
My Culture:
The national cultures I have the most respect for are those of Americas’ first nations and the Chinese nations. Tibetan, south Asian, and African nation cultures also inspire me a great deal. I feel I am an internationalist, even though I really only know English, and have never really left the US. I feel meta to our cultures, I am native to none, and to all.
My Religion:
I have few spiritual convictions, but those I have are deeply considered, and constitute my own religion of one member, seeking unity with All. I believe Allness composes us all, the unity of all is the most powerful fact of existence, as obvious as is the liberty of the one, in all our multiple forms of interdependance.
I do not believe in the divisions some make between the spiritual and the material, nor those between sentience and material; wisdom, the All, the one, the information, the emotion, the spirit, the rays, particles, and fields composed of space and time, are all one unified whole, and are each composed of all the others.
I feel the opposite of good is not evil, but stupid, and that we are each free to define good, especially as it strengthens the good of all, and fits within a reasonably consensual mind-frame. The divisions humans make between peoples and beings are not good. As with the idea of evil, there may well have been a time when such divisions served the reverence and health of the diversity of the All, and all the people, but it is no longer. I deny all divisions between any one as illusion, and seek the underlying themes of being creation, to me the spirit of Allness is the penultimate state and authority.
I am at core firmly a materialist. I feel that all the pieces have the same authority of existence, and are all composed of the same degree of veracity and illusion, the particle, the ray, the field, the spirit, the love, the beauty, the information, the knowledge, the wisdom, the motion, the stillness, all composed of each other in one grand pageant of dance, being, work, song, life, and growth. Gravity is Goddess’s Love, keeping us from the cold unlike of thin space, but only just. We must each and every one struggle towards the collective end. Whether we can see the beauty of the purpose or not, whether we perceive success, or not, we are all in the act of composing the Allness, the one, or the feedback among every.
This is your after-death. All things, here, now, always. Whether or not she that transcends and embodies all space and time has yet to fully evolve, when she does, she’ll be here now, and we each will be a part of her being becoming. Our Earth-Mother needs us to have wisdom now to ensure she can sustain us. If we cannot, she will still go on to evolve towards blooming the love, light, and organization of life’s continuing evolution of complexity across our galaxy. Even a major asteroid, or the un-postpone-able red giant our sun will become, may only delay and spread her, spreading her seeds to a new fertile berth.
My Philosophy:
We must be ready to love and act with great courage to out evolve human consequences.
Personnel Committee
Peace Action Wisconsin
1001 E. Keefe Ave.
Milwaukee, WI 53212
Re: Office Manager
Esteemed Committee Being,
I was very pleased to see the email announcing the opening of the office manager position. I feel both that I am an excellent candidate for the position and that it is an excellent fit for my own professional growth and fulfilment.
I have theoretical training in the structure of databases and am familiar with spreadsheets, databases, and web based data structuring, but am inexperienced in accounting. I am, however, confident in my math skills, my ability to learn quickly, and my ability to teach myself on line. I grew up in a family business household, working in the fund raising sector, and have close friends with whom I discuss spreadsheets and other such instruments, so I am aware of many of the concepts behind bookkeeping.
An inveterate learner of everything, I always learn more about whatever it is I am doing. Working for peace is something I’ve been studying and doing all of my adult life. I would love to have more opportunities to focus upon it.
As someone with an often unique perspective on things, I am used to putting consensus between others ahead of my personal feelings. Regardless of the institution I’m working within, compromise is the soul of politics. I enjoy looking at both sides of an argument until we all can find the most solid common ground.
In many contexts I have discovered that I enjoy serving others, working with others, and working with the public. As I have yet to be employed in a context where I enjoy both serving well, and working with, the public, I look forward to meeting with you to discuss my fitness for this position, and thank you kindly for your consideration.
Sincerely yours,
Monte N. Letourneau
(also found below, or download it as a .doc, .odt, .rtf, or .txt.)
Objectives
Work Experience
Education
Volunteerism
Interests
References
Website Portfolio
Business & E-Commerce Sites I have Designed
Social Web & Social Bookmarking Applications
Joomla, Templates, Drupal, & CMS
Hand Coded HTML
Art Portfolio
GIF Animations
Paintings
Renderings
Sculpture
Academic Portfolio / CV
(also found below, or download it as a .doc, .odt, .rtf, or .txt.)
List of My Courses
About My Courses Before Returning to UWM
Information Resources at SOIS UWM, and My Four Core Competencies
Future Directions
About Me
What is Meta?
About BSIR SOIS UWM
What is Technologia?
What is InfoGnosis?
Capstone Assignment to Create Portfolio
My MySpace Profile
My Facebook Profile
My LinkedIn Profile
My Twitter Profile
Cover Letters:
JoomlAssist Proposal
Green Party US Fund Raising Assistant
Indian Community School of Milwaukee
Peace Action Wisconsin
RESUME:
Monte Letourneau
N14466 n20th Avenue
Necedah, WI 54646
geanark@gmail.com
608-565-3516
http://montesite.net
OBJECTIVE – I am primarily interested in working for the common good, and towards a just and sustainable future. My ideal position would utilize my facility for, and enjoyment of, working with & serving others, researching & structuring information, design, teaching, a user’s perspective, creating tutorials & S.O.P. checklists, and the joy I take in talking to people about the things that really matter to them.
WORK EXPERIENCE:
Self Employed 1990 – Present Allness Unlimited
Web design and site maintenance, structural painting and restoration, woodworking, arts, crafts, jewelry, and other creative pursuits.
Webmaster 04/2004 – 09/2006 UCSB Milwaukee, WI
Maintaining and updating the web publication, Himalayan Linguistics Journal for the Linguistics Departments of UCSB and UWM.
Instructor’s Assistant Spring Semester 2004 UWM Milwaukee, WI
Research and paperwork for a School of Information Studies instructor.
Water Treatment 6/00 – 1/01 Institech / ITU New Berlin, WI
Waste water flotation treatment and recycling operation, forklift certification, maintenance, some welding.
Bartender 12/01-2/02 Clique Soul Club Milwaukee, WI
01/01-9/01 Shanahan’s Irish Pub Milwaukee, WI
Injection Mold Setup 6/99 -12/99 Interplas Ltd. Menomonee Falls, WI
Mold Set-up: Setting and pulling small quick-change molds, process troubleshooting, repair and maintenance of water thermal regulation systems.
9/98-9/99 Generation 2 Plastics Milwaukee, WI
Setting molds, some fabrication and maintenance, supervising second shift production, production reports, creating process S.O.P. checklists, W-2 client training in mold operation and inspection. Audits. Recycled polypropylene material extrusion. Melt flow tests. Densification. Forklift. Materials blending and sorting.
EDUCATION:
2007 University Wisconsin Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI
Information and Library Science
2000 Wisconsin Bartending College Milwaukee, WI
Bar Tending
1985-1988 University of Wisconsin Madison, WI
History, Anthropology, Political Science
1984-1985 Academy Of Health Science/National Guard San Antonio, TX
Basic Medical Laboratory 92B BML10
RECENT VOLUNTEERISM:
Milwaukee Area Green Party – 1998-2007, Co-ordinating Council member for 5 years
WI Green Party – 2003-Present, Co-ordinating Council Rep for the 4th, 5th, and 3rd Cong. Districts since 2003
US Green Party – 2004-Present, National Committee Rep for the 3rd Congressional District since 2007
Feed the Need Necedah and NecedahHarvest.org – 2008-Present, Steering committee, Webmaster, and Activist, for local food security and buy local efforts
INTERESTS:
Joomla & Drupal CMS, all sciences, reading, history, aquaria, art painting, computers, infognostics, interdisciplinary fields of study generally, especially Archeaology, and new paradigms of connectivity.
The reverence of Allness through seeking sustainability and grace in human affairs is essential in all I do.
References:
RECENT SUPERVISORS:
Michael Noonan, Professor of Linguistics, Dept. of English UWM
Wooseob Jeong, Assistant Professor, UWM SOIS
ACADEMIC:
Johannes Britz, D.D., D. Phil., Dean & Professor UWM SOIS
Jacques du Plessis, Professor UWM SOIS
Pa Moua (Paj Muas), ME-PD, Student Adviser
FRIENDS:
Mark E Sarvela, Program Evaluation Manager Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare, DHFS – DCFS
Gregory H. Bartz, NASA Flight Management Subcontractor
Anna R. Olson, Creative Director, Cream City Ribbon
Contact information on request at geanark@gmail.com
Download Resume as: .doc, .odt, .rtf, or .txt.
Academic Portfolio
Monte Letourneau
May 20, 2005
Table of contents:
List of My Courses
About My Courses Before Returning to UWM
Information Resources at SOIS UWM, and My Four Core Competencies
Future Directions
List of My Courses:
Course Grade Description Credits Transfered As
Area I
E ASIAN 101 D First Semester Chinese 6 LINGUIS 121
COMP LIT 288 AB Masterpieces of Literature For Honors II 3 COMPLIT 208
LINGUIS 200 A- Aspects of Language 3 :
ANTHRO 101 A- Introduction to Anthro-Human Prehistory 3 :
POL SCI 175 B+ Introduction to International Relations 3 :
WL ECOL 360 B Extinction Of Species 3 BIO SCI XN
ZOOLOGY 120 BC Biolocical Principles and their Impact On Society 3 BIO SCI 103
Area II
L&I SCI 632 A Microcomputer-Information Resources Management 3
L&I SCI 110 A Introduction to Information Science 3
L&I SCI 210 A- Foundations of University Library Research 3 :
L&I SCI 230 A Organization of Knowledge 3 :
L&I SCI 250 A Internet Planning & Implementation 3 :
L&I SCI 330 Electronic Information Retrieval 3 :
L&I SCI 410 Database Information Retrieval Systems 3 :
L&I SCI 430 Multimedia Application Developement 3 :
L&I SCI 490 Senior Capstone; DVD Site Project Management & this document 3 :
Area III
Business:
L&I SCI 640 A- Information Marketing 3 :
Area IV
L&I SCI 240 A Information Architecture I 3 :
L&I SCI 340 A Information Architecture II 3 :
L&I SCI 399 Independent Study; XML 3 :
L&I SCI 440 Information Architecture III 3 :
L&I SCI 510 Introduction to Reference Services & Resources 3 :
L&I SCI 681 Archives & Primary Sources in the information Age 3 :
Electives:
POLI SCI 209 B Issues In Political Thought 4 POL SCI XS :
POLI SCI 260 BC Latin America: An Introduction 4 HIST 180
POL SCI 392 Survey Research: Design, Perform, & Analyize Unemployment Attitudes Poll 3 :
POLI SCI 551 BC Quantitative Analaysis Of Political Data 4 POL SCI 390
POLI SCI 570 C Literature And Politics 4 POL SCI U
POLI SCI 651 B Politics Of South Asia 4 POL SCI U
POLI SCI 654 AB Politics Of Revolution 4 POL SCI 321
ANTHRO 22 B+ Ancient Cities of the Americas 1 :
COMPLIT 232 B+ Literature and Politics: Religious & Moral Perspectives of the 19th & 20th Centuries 3 :
ILS 202 BC Integrated Liberal Studies; Western Culture: History of Science, Technology, & Philosophy II 3 TRAN-L&S XS :
LIT TRAN 262 B Survey Of Chinese Literature 3 COMPLIT X 3.00
AFROAMER 277 B Africa: An Introductory Survey 4 AFRICOL 232
E ASIAN 240 A Introduction to the I-Ching: Book Of Change 2 TRAN-L&S
PHILOS 204 B+ Introduction to Asian Religions 3 :
SPANISH 101 F First Year Spanish 0 SPANISH 103
Course Topic(s): Chinese Calligraphy
PEACEST 201 Introduction to Peace Studies & Conflict Resolution 3
2003-05-28 Deans Honor List
2004-01-06 Deans Honor List
My Learning Prior to SOIS at UWM:
My concentration has been on political science and studies of cultures.
There have been many opportunities for me to integrate my focus on the needs of citizens, whilst pursuing my SOIS studies.
Within SOIS I have focused a few graduate courses on library science, so one could easily say I have concentrated on the citizen need for information resources and how it can best be filled with our current capabilities. I have focused much study on the optimal future development of information resources for public use into the future.
There are several competencies that it has served me well to study; many of the most useful come from the second half of my academic career, when I’ve studied IR at UWM SOIS. The foundation upon which that course of study was laid was half a lifetime’s self directed study on the historical issues of the people in politics, and the possibilities that our technical development can and does open up for a more human future. The core of this study is the first half of my academic career; I particularly was left an impression on by a handful of these classes. Although the mists of time deprive me of much detail, I will start with the classes from my classic liberal arts / humanities phase.
First chapter highlights start with Ancient Cities of the Americas, Anthro 22. Although I can’t remember the professor’s name, he was a giant in his field and had been in charge of the digs at Teotehuacan and Cahokia, each for extended critical periods of time. He taught no more soon after that (1985), and was so old he was difficult to hear, but he put me on to a very important concept that is still having a hard time being accepted as the new paradigm. He told me, in trying to make sense of some details, or another, that there was much circumstantial evidence for many ancient American cities that tells a similar tale.
These city states all developed very complex hierarchies. These tended to grow over time, and eventually become too large and top heavy to be supported by those below. At this point they would eat up all their reserves, and hinterlands. Then when nothing could keep it working, the culture would collapse completely. As there would be no food anywhere nearby, the entire culture of that place would disappear, and the survivors would simply found a new, more egalitarian way of life somewhere else. He was quite convincing with this case using Cahokia, where he was the prominent expert in the field, and the evidence is quite strong now that this was the case. The Teotehuacan hierarchy may have survived somewhat transmuted as the Aztec, or some other aristocracy, its case is not so cut and dried. He hinted that the Maya may also prove to be a similar case, and since he has left us, the case has become pretty solid that the Maya just threw the culture away but are still using many of the same walled orchards, built long ago, today.
This gives me much hope, for I saw us as more like the Cahokian model, but without the ability to escape back to the hinterland and the wilderness. Our culture is so profoundly large, and impacts this planet so universally, that this class helped me see another way that we are meeting a grave new challenge never seen before. Next social collapse, there will be nowhere to leave to. This paradigm also pointed out the degree to which our culture has a built in addiction to frontiers, and that the frontier of human endeavor had transformed historically with the close the physical frontier of earth’s lands.
This lesson was bolstered by my simultaneously taking Anthro 101, and was thrown in sharp contrast by Intro to International Relations (the other IR), Poli Sci 175. A professor whose name I prefer to forget thought that the concept of hegemony was deep, and important, and the greatest thing since sliced bread. I may have been more inclined to agree with him were his intent to teaching hegemony less akin to Kissinger’s intent in practicing it. This semester is when I discovered my true enemy was hierarchal socio-political power, not the hierarchy itself, but the concept of its legitimacy.
So that was my first semester at UWM, formative. Then I went to Madison.
There were four courses that had a great impact on me individually, and one semester when three courses combined to cover the three sides of the golden triangle. These all were part of my focus on the political history of the peoples of our world.
The two most important of these seven were focused on biology and the history of science.
The first of the four was Poli Sci 209, Issues in Political Thought. The issue for the semester was the history of words used to identify political ideologies. In this class I came to understand that disparate modern ideologies had all started as something that I believed in strongly, but that over time the vagaries of political power had twisted the discourse until it was impossible to use these words to have meaningful discussion of the concepts that they represent. This is because they each have so many different meanings to different people. It helped me understand how skewed modern American political discourse is, and why it is so difficult to discuss politics meaningfully in the US. This formed the basis of my ability to define my very simple anarkic beliefs, regardless of my audiences’ understanding of ideological terms.
The theme of Chinese, and Asian religious cultures, that also spanned these years, contributed much to my ability to discuss my spiritual beliefs, which were emerging from my atheism at the same time.
The other Poli Sci course that had great impact was Poli Sci 654, Politics of Revolution. I’d always wanted to see myself as a revolutionary, this course helped me sort thru what is wrong and what is right with the revolutions that have occurred so far. One of the best parts of it was that we looked closely at what causes revolution; what factors were always present, and which, not being present, prevent effective change regardless of the need. The perception of the possibility of positive change appears to be the most important predisposition towards people changing their world. This concept has had a profound impact on me and it has grown stronger and more refined over time.
Two science courses had a profound impact on me in ways that go beyond science to political and spiritual understandings that have remained important to me. The prior semester had laid some foundations for this. Three classes covered different sides of the infamous golden triangle at the same time; this really helped me achieve a good overview of modern western history. Poli Sci 260, Intro to Latin America, and Afroamer 277 Intro to Africa really helped me understand how eurocentric culture has in fact created underdevelopment, and that it is sustained by the state department and other institutions that have inherited the mantle of the wealth and power of the eurocentric economic worldview. The other class I had that semester is hard to describe, for it was an interdisciplinary look at the evolution of western culture, science, technology, and philosophy. Integrated Liberal Studies 202 II was full of expansive ideas and charted the interrelation of what we see as different fields of study, and how they have become fragmented over time. All three of these classes spent the same two weeks on the period of the golden triangle. At the end of this time I realized that I had acquired a quite a broad and comprehensive view of western history, from within it’s philosophical core, and in it’s context of other cultures.
The take home lesson for this semester: when an ancient Greek used the word teknos, he was discussing not only how, and with what, but also why. We have divorced our reason from itself; we do not ask why we design science, technology, and philosophy. They have all become ancillaries to earning money, which motive is unquestioned. That this is the essential goal of our culture (earning more money for/by those who already have much of it), and our biggest barrier to good politics, science, and technology, was beginning to become apparent to me, but it was the history of science that straightened me out for good. I clearly remember History of Science 101, but my transfer transcripts contain no reference to it. It was near the end of this class, which was a broad overview of the rise of modern science over the last few centuries, that I realized that a good portion of the technical difficulties we are having with survival on earth has come from a changing of the priorities and motives for science, research, and technical development over the years.
What originally was a grand enterprise to improve the human condition and grow closer to God by understanding his world better has become mainly harnessed to the capitalist profit motive. There are many small reasons for this, and collectively they are quite substantial. This changed my core understanding, until then I saw all political problems as essentially being solvable by technical solutions.
Now I see that all technical problems require political solutions.
Information Resources at SOIS UWM, and My Four Core Competencies:
This brings me to the second half of my course work, a focus on the teknos of solutions to political problems. Entering the SOIS, I had the advantage of seeing technology not as object, but as process implying a purpose. I also had the advantage of knowing the power of information and knowledge to transform our world, as well as knowing the importance information access for everyone has to the world. Though I could only see at the time that I would rather study information use generally than any given field, I have found in IR studies the answers the first half of my studies had sent me looking for.
I felt simultaneously well updated and at home in my first semester back at UWM, in the IR program at SOIS. In L&I SCI 632 and L&I SCI 110 there was much discussion about the ethics of information use. We covered the need for intellectual property security, and the digital divide. These discussions helped bring my focus on socio-political issue back into focus. Class discussion in these classes did more to help me comprehend the current state of these issues more than any other materials could have. These two classes rounded out the competency I brought back to school with me. This is a basic, broad humanities background with a view of the context of our past, but a focus on current and future needs. I have rounded out this competency with the addition of PEACEST 201, Intro to Conflict Resolution, we studied conflict and it’s resolution. There was a real relevance here in that the digital divide and the information economy were important topics of the class. William Ury’s “Getting to Peace” was an excellent text that put a larger context to our cultural development. His essential argument was that we have returned to the expandable economic pie of our ancestors who were hunter-gatherers as a result of the knowledge economy. He places blame for violence amongst humans largely on the limited economic resources of the agricultural revolution. Like a hunter gather economy, but more so, the resources that matter in the knowledge revolution expand when shared, instead of shrinking like land and water do when shared. Ury is famous for his work as a corporate consultant and mediator. This socio-economic competence is formative and central to me. There are three other competencies that I value very much, it is easier to discuss them while discussing the second half of my course work, which is mostly in IR. In a word each: research, project management, and web implementation. My preexisting artistic bent has enjoyed flourishing particularly in web implementation and design.
The core competency that I value having expanded in SOIS, is the ability to do research. In L&I Sci. 210, Foundations of University Library Research, I learned how to research and document a good college paper. I had acquired a pretty good sense for how to write a paper, but this course covers material every student should know about how to use reference materials better to do research and to document it.
In L&I SCI 330, Electronic Info Retrieval, and L&I SCI 510, Intro to Reference Services and Resources, my ability to do research was expanded and solidified. The ability to find the information one needs is the most important skill today in my opinion. In all three of these course’s, databases, the Internet, and practice, were far more powerful than any books that could have been assigned. The familiarity I gained with the use of a reference library is invaluable to me, and was given uncommon depth, for a baccalaureate, by the addition of L&I SCI 681, Using Archives: The Value of Primary Sources in the Information Age. This course is about managing and organizing archives. One of its focuses was about basic marketing issues, this helped complete the course of thought began with L&I SCI 640, Information Marketing. This class was primarily about marketing information; the focus was on marketing free library resources to the public in an information economy. As this course was one of my first IR courses, it set a course of questioning that I followed throughout these following courses, comprising what I call the engineering, or development, competency.
One of the few courses that had books that I thought were instrumental to me was, L&I SCI 310, Human Factors of Info Seeking and Use. This course was essentially a study of usability. As someone who has an interest in universal info access, it was very instructive to study the methods of measuring and ameliorating usability problems. There were two books in this class that left an impression on me. The first was “Don’t Make Me Think”, almost a new type of book, being easy to skim and navigate; it was the best example I’ve ever seen for Steve Krug’s points about web design in book form. Donald Norman’s “Things that Make Us Smart” was all about how the focus of the information technology should be on conforming it to human needs, as opposed to the recent historical trend of adapting human behavior to the machines. To function, the knowledge economy technology needs to make us smarter. Tools that are not easily handled by the human mind don’t makes us smart as effectively.
To further bolster this engineering, or product development, focus, it was instructive to have three other courses in addition. L&I SCI 250, Internet Planning & Implementation, taught me how to build an enterprise scale intranet, and introduced the concept of project management, and working in groups. PM techniques were expanded upon and given depth and context in L&I SCI 340, Information Architecture II. Here we learned about basic PM tools and techniques. This was a good course for understanding information projects in the context of a modern corporate culture that is aware of the need for good project management. In L&I SCI 490, Senior Capstone, we put PM methods and tools into use in a group project of design and implementation of a scripted website.
The capstone class also capped off experience and formal study in the remaining competency, interactive web design and implementation. This is the competency that I most enjoy exercising and learning, because it satisfies my creative and artistic self. In L&S 110, we were introduced to HTML markup. I was delighted to design my first web page in this class, and this carried over into L&I SCI 240, Information Architecture I, where we learned a lot about HTML and learned some JavaScript as well. We also learned about CSS and other kinds of templates. L&I SCI 440, Information Architecture III, expanded this scripting background; we designed ASP and PHP interactive web applications that worked with databases. There were several good texts covered in these courses, but the best sources were web based, like Webmonkey.com, and W3C pages.
Future Directions:
Designing web implementations gave me ideas that may bring all these competencies back together. I am working out some ideas I have for how web applications can be used to automate some of the work of group self governance. On the surface the concept is no more than a survey, but it is hyper survey. A web application could make it much easier, and more democratic, to share opinions and decisions. Just for beginners, we could rank the questions to order them by value, and share each other’s answers. Most important, the web environment will enable more ease of rewording of proposed questions and the posting new questions by participants. All in all, there is much room to improve communication, expression, and decisions, on political matters in the online environment. There are security issues that I find hard to solve simply, without the use of nominal Paypal payments, or some other such conceptually inappropriate use, but they are not intractable to a fair solution, and new solutions will arise organically.
A similar idea is to use cooperative effort to compile useful link lists to serve the peoples’ expanding need for coherence in the flood of data. A multi-axis system of categories and rankings could be combined with user inputs and valuations. This could enable the finding, and listing, of links in a number of different criteria simultaneously, with a ranking along a spectrum of each criterion. In this way one could search for just the right level of knowledge at the intersection of several interests. Some of these axes (political radicalism, or left-right spectrum, as opposed to the freedom-safety spectrum, or scientific radical-conservative spectrum) would be more subjective and geared towards values, trust, and taste. XML, which was the topic of my independent study, L&I SCI 399, is a markup that would make a good platform core for these types of applications.
My focus on universal empowerment through knowledge access has been brought much empowerment itself, in the form of these three other competencies. Research, product development, and web implementation, are well bundled here to perform the job I have assigned myself. It is my job to help all I can to ensure that these possibilities are used to help us all, for our boat is now to small for us to survive historic levels of collective individual selfishness. The new frontier is knowledge automation, but good results there are right next door to everyone, truly this is a new kind of new frontier. Clearly this frontier is in many ways the most open ever in terms of possibilities. I have confidence in our ability to build a sustainable knowledge economy, for the possibilities are limited only by our imagination. Yet I am concerned, for Politics of Revolution has taught me that we will not change our ways unless we perceive that we are able, and there is much in our socio-economic system that argues that we are helpless before it. We are not, however, helpless before it, it is we. Whether we know, or care, or not, every one of us changes and defines our culture, every day.
Currently I see my future in self employment as a webmaster while also working in the non-profit sector and/or knowledge industry. It is my dream to work with the national Green Party web team while working for Google. In both cases I would seek to work on ideas like the two cited above. Ultimately I would like to work in consulting and as a webmaster, while creating a game site out of the Science Fiction Utopian novel I’ve been working on. I would like to find a way to express my artistic urges in the meantime, so I am thinking about studies in computer imagery. In the meantime I intend to spend my summer learning Macromedia.
Download Academic Portfolio 2005 as a .doc, .odt, .rtf, or .txt.
Personnel Committee
Peace Action Wisconsin
1001 E. Keefe Ave.
Milwaukee, WI 53212
Re: Office Manager
Esteemed Committee Being,
I was very pleased to see the email announcing the opening of the office manager position. I feel both that I am an excellent candidate for the position and that it is an excellent fit for my own professional growth and fulfilment.
I have theoretical training in the structure of databases and am familiar with spreadsheets, databases, and web based data structuring, but am inexperienced in accounting. I am, however, confident in my math skills, my ability to learn quickly, and my ability to teach myself on line. I grew up in a family business household, working in the fund raising sector, and have close friends with whom I discuss spreadsheets and other such instruments, so I am aware of many of the concepts behind bookkeeping.
An inveterate learner of everything, I always learn more about whatever it is I am doing. Working for peace is something I’ve been studying and doing all of my adult life. I would love to have more opportunities to focus upon it.
As someone with an often unique perspective on things, I am used to putting consensus between others ahead of my personal feelings. Regardless of the institution I’m working within, compromise is the soul of politics. I enjoy looking at both sides of an argument until we all can find the most solid common ground.
In many contexts I have discovered that I enjoy serving others, working with others, and working with the public. As I have yet to be employed in a context where I enjoy both serving well, and working with, the public, I look forward to meeting with you to discuss my fitness for this position, and thank you kindly for your consideration.
Sincerely yours,
Monte N. Letourneau
I would be most proud to work for ICS, and would strive to become a real asset to the school.
My Skill Set:
Familiarity with assistance, learning, and multimedia on Windows and Mac networked platforms,
enjoyment of a facility with helping and learning, full familiarity with small network hardware, and a designer’s eye for detail.
I understand organizing information resources for research and learning, creating web multimedia training and assisting aides,graphic design, desktop publishing of organizational publicity and paper communications, social and eco activism, local indio cultures in biological, historical, and cultural context, and practices of consensus decision making.
I don’t like to do Joomla anymore, I vastly prefer to work with WordPress and am as rapidly losing whatever qualifications I had for creating in Drupal and Joomla as I did for hacking and maintaining Windows, which I was much better at – until Ubuntu set me free.
www.metrodining.ca- random high end looking Joomla site.There are a lot of options today to enable those needing cheap access to an enterprise quality web presence.We can easily do far better than just to provide web services and hosting. I can create and index lists of resources that enable sites to be easily created, quickly modified, and updated with barely computer literate skill sets.
Regardless of whether we are looking for a very intensive focus on setting up a few clients with web pages and maintaining these sites, or want to take a more labor extensive approach to maximize the number which can be assisted by teaching each to be more self sufficient (leaving more time for expert assistance with graphics, design, advice, and opinion, instead of daily maintenance), there are many open source platforms available for free that can produce a better return on our labors.
Historically, few resources have been as undervalued as online learning resources are right now, especially in such fields as open source CMS use. To do the work of indexing, tagging, and commenting, on such resources can create a lot of value with freely available info and a little time.
I already seek to create an indexing of tutorials, free templates, and other free resources for the beginning Joomla user, enabling people to make professional web sites for free, or very professional sites for very low cost. I also have been working to collect freeware, troubleshooting, and advice, resources, to help people take better control of their Windows machines and be more self sufficient. It has been hard to continue this work over the years, as few, besides my professors, have shown much interest or received much benefit yet, and as I have been using Ubuntu lately myself. The kind of work that WBI does provides the perfect opportunity for me to continue work on creating a site and a work flow that can really make a difference for people who do not have as much training, time, or money, as most people think it takes to achieve an effective and productive web space.
Joomla & Drupal
The Joomla! CMS (Content Management System) has shown many people that it is more important to have an easily modified site accessible to more than just the Webmasters, than to have one that uses all the latest flashy techniques to just look good and do nothing.
Between them, Drupal and Joomla have remained the two most popular Open Source CMSs for many years, despite having been joined by thousands of competitors. Being most widely used, they are also most widely contributed to by Open Source fans.
CMS allows a site to be much more interactive, adaptable, easily posted to, and edited. For individual webmasters similar efforts at hand coding such database integration cannot begin to achieve as much function as quickly and reliably as an average computer literate user can get from Joomla.
Optional plugins can easily add more interactive functionality to Joomla, adding value for customers to the product. These two links are to products which allow reservations using forms on the website http://joomlatp.com/joomla-1.5-plugin/Restaurant-Reservation-plugin.html, and to easily design and change menus http://joomlatp.com/joomla-1.5-component/Joomla-Restaurant-component.html.
This kind of updated currency and functional usefullness can be far less frustrating than waiting for a pretty page to load that then does not perform any useful function which a print ad cannot.
Restaurants are a great example here. Ambience is an important part of the service for many restaurants, but it is not the only reason for patronage. People expect that the food will have at least as much value as the setting. Similarly, a nice looking flash site can bring much ambience, but no one goes to a restaurant’s site seeking entertainment, they want to eat or they would not be there.
Many firms are using such systems to use low cost labor to produce results that are billed for as if much technical skill was required when it was not. The disjunct between the public perception of webmaster skill requirements and increasingly easily automated chimp work creates many profit opportunities. One such opportunity is helping the small business owner get what they need for a good price in a treacherous market.
The problem is that although CMS are much easier to learn and use than the old hand coding and FTP transfers, there are many things about the work flow that are very counter intuitive at first. One can spend days spinning one’s wheels trying to figure out what one is supposed to be doing, especially just getting started all alone. These kinds of frustration that I have had to deal with have shown me what is most important to know and how to avoid the pitfalls. I would love to pass this info on in some more permanent archive so that others do not have to reinvent the wheel.
This seems a great opportunity for me to work on the self help materials and advising skills that I have been wanting to assemble for some time, while also sharpening my more practiced skills of graphic web design, user empathy, and information architecture.
To see a small sample of the range of tutorials already freely available see the link list at the bottom of this page.
I do not yet have the tools to quickly create a site like www.metrodining.ca, but the tools are relatively quite cheap and I already have a great interest in purchasing them. Joomla tools and expansions are usually a great deal for the money compared to any similarly effective option. Of course this results in many deals being offered that are not as good as they could be. I can offer good advice on buying templates, extensions, plug-ins, and services. Generally one can get an awful lot in this regard for $15-$50, some useful extensions are even cheaper than that.
One thing is for certain, while www.metrodining.ca is similar to sites that can cost as much as $3000-$4000 or more, it probably came in well under 10% of that. Even if one seeks the very best, Joomla or Drupal can make it better much cheaper.
To look at the Joomla admin interface, or take it for a test drive:
In the resulting screen enter this data:Username = humanPassword = admin
The “Content” drop down menu is the most interesting one at first, one can go to “Articles” to post a new article or to edit old ones, or rearrange the front page in “Front Page Manager”. This is also where one adds and edits “Sections” and “Categories” which can greatly help improve the sites usefulness if properly utilized. If one wants to create a link to a new page for an article, category, or section, one must go to the “Menus” drop down menu.
One can also control users, user groups and access levels, installation of extensions and templates, placement and enabling of the different modules, and many other things, from the Admin Control Panel.
Look & Layout, Templates:The “look and feel”, or overall graphic design, of a Joomla Site is controlled by a CSS template. My sites intentionally use the three default templates to keep things simple and consistent, but there are many great templates available for free.Three Default Joomla Templates come with every install: http://necedahharvest.org/ JA Purity http://montesite.net/joomla/ Rhuk Milkyway http://montesite.net/test/ Beez
I will be creating a list of the best sites offering quality free templates which can be installed gratis. There will also be a growing list of templates displayed on a local server from which to choose.
There are many more, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I will also be creating a list of resources on how to modify or create Joomla templates, and will work with users to ensure that their sites reflect the branding and intent of the enterprise at hand.As with other training materials, where pre-existing resources are scarce, or where the most relevant materials contain much that is not relevant, I intend to create more training resources to fill such gaps.
The first resource I plan to purchase given additional funds is a recently released template editor, Artisteer http://www.artisteer.com/. Artisteer’s drag and drop interface with buttons allows anyone to easily manipulate templates (for $129.95). This will allow further, and more efficient, customization, and for appropriate branding to be exercised within the available templates, or it can allow entirely new templates to be built to user branding specifications.
Until I have acquired the expertise to create a site like www.metrodining.ca, I will still be a very good judge of prices, and the field of contenders, and will help those who opt to spend some money find better deals on competent Template designs and plug-ins to expand functionality.
There are several business suites of plug-ins and extension modules available for nominal fees that allow better e-commerce integration and more options. I also expect to be investing in some of these for our program. The over head of buying Joomla services and products is low, for there is always a free way that can be wrestled into the desired shape with enough effort, and the ethic of Open Source is the foundation of the industry after all. Quite often a nominal subscription fee is charged over a time period that allows one to download all the materials one is interested in at the time, this will allow me too cheaply and quickly build a library of such assets for this program and public future use.
When I have had some more experience with Artisteer, I will add a form to specify most of the more commonly useful design options in order to standardize, automate, and facilitate, user design input and requests.
As the effort acquires more plug-ins, templates, and extension modules, more pages will go up on a central index to show how to use these options.
Promotion of everything has become common on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and the myriad social web applications. I have spent years trying many of them and finding out which are best for what. As the biggest by far, Facebook has proved to be the king in most respects, but social bookmarking is often ovelooked as a real help to publicizing and promoting sites.
Google ranking, reciprocal links, and other web promotion methods.
Other important resources and information for a neophyte’s web presence include ones about understanding and implementing effective website monetization, promotion, and metrics. This is another skill set that has been made much easier and more effective every day by good technical solutions, especially ones coming from Google. This is another arena where lots of great advice and tutorials can be found online, but they are swamped in even more marginally helpful content promoting the purchase of something the well informed do not really need.
This is another area that I have been keeping up on that this would provide a welcome opportunity for a more intensive focus on: indexing links to best practices and strategies for web metrics, site promotion techniques, better search rankings, reciprocal links, and selling or purchasing advertising.
All of my own intellectual work is always open source, I do not want to own it. The Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative Corporation will have every right to use it in perpetuity; in return, no party will have control or ownership over my intellectual property. Conversely, all users of the service will retain all ownership of their sites’ content, and any custom work on sites’ templates.
We stand on the shoulders of our forebears, and we owe it to those who have passed their knowledge on to us to reciprocally share our protion of the unlimited bounty of human ingenuity and imagination.
I have no interest in becoming irreplaceable. To me any job done well is one that is documented well enough to be easy to pick up after a disaster or loss of the organizing worker, especially in the information economy. Transparency and good documentation are key to the long term health of any web space.
Let’s create an infrastructure that will allow us to help people help themselves first, so as to have the resources left to provide expert opinions, advice, and skills support.
Esteemed Committee Being,
I was very pleased to see the email announcing the opening of the Fund Raising Assistant position. I feel both that I am an excellent candidate for the position and that it is an excellent fit for my own professional growth and personal fulfillment.
I have had a fair amount of experience at using the phone in a professional manner, much of which there is little to be proud of, and no room for in my resume.
As a youth, my parents ran a fund raising subcontracting business out of our home, so from an early age I was used to answering the phone and speaking in a professional manner.
One of the first jobs I ever had was as a survey taker for Pert Survey Research, doing market research. For a very short while soon after that i had a job selling substandard machine shop supplies at exorbitant prices, this is where I learned that it matters very much to me that my work be constructive and helpful to others.
During the 80′s I also had a brief stint as a canvasser for Wisconsin Action Coalition and Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, these were both cut short by problems with my knees due to injuries sustained late in my teenage years.
I worked for the campaign of Peter Blewett (District 7 and President of the Milwaukee School Board) during his last re-election, using the state of the art phone banking system of the SEIU.
Later that same year I was involved in the design, performance, and analysis of a poll on the attitudes of Wisconsinites to unemployment and the minimum wage for the class POL SCI 392 Survey Research, at UW Milwaukee.
Working for Green issues is something that I have sought to do for most of my life, and I would love to have an opportunity to begin to focus my career upon it.
In many contexts I have discovered that I enjoy serving others, working with others, and working with the public. As I have yet to be employed in a context where I get to enjoy both serving well, and working constructively with, the public, I look forward to being considered a good fit for this position.
Sincerely yours,
Monte N. Letourneau
Enclosure: Resume
My academic portfolio and more about me can be found at: Resume Index
I don’t like to do Joomla anymore, I vastly prefer to work with WordPress and am as rapidly losing whatever qualifications I had for creating in Drupal and Joomla as I did for hacking and maintaining Windows, which I was much better at – until Ubuntu set me free.
There are a lot of options today to enable those needing cheap access to an enterprise quality web presence.
We can do more than providing static web services. I can create and index lists of resources that better enable sites to be easily created, quickly modified, and updated with barely computer literate skills.
Whether the need is an intensive focus on a few clients, or to maximize the number which can be assisted, there are open source platforms available that can produce a better return on our labors.
Joomla! CMS (Content Management System) has shown many people that it is more important to have an easily modified site accessible by more than just Webmasters, than one that uses the latest flashy techniques to just look good and do nothing.
Drupal and Joomla have remained the most popular Open Source CMSs for many years, even though they’ve been joined by thousands of competitors.CMS allows a site to be much more interactive, adaptable, easily posted to, and edited. For individual webmasters similar efforts at hand coding such database integration cannot begin to achieve as much function as quickly and reliably as an average computer literate user can get from Joomla.
The work flow of a CMS is awkward at first. Many days can be saved by having some very simple things pointed out up front. I would like to make link lists and desktop vid tutorials to ensure people get off on the right foot by becoming familiar with the tasks of editing and creating articles.
Where there are gaps between the diverse and numerous aids and resources available for free, I will create desktop video tutorials like this one http://montesite.net/os/tutorial/1.html.
While some of the best Joomla tools and plug-ins are not free they are usually quite cheap. I am likely to buy all we need myself anyway given a renewed regular income.
Certainly, while www.metrodining.ca is similar to sites that can cost as much as $3000-$4000 or more, it could have come in well under 10% of that. Even seeking the very best, Joomla or Drupal can make it better, cheaper, faster, easier.
To look at the Joomla admin interface, or take it for a test drive:
In the resulting screen enter this data:Username = human
Password = admin
The “Content” drop down menu is the most interesting one. Go to “Articles” to post a new article or to edit old ones, or rearrange the front page in “Front Page Manager”.
“Look and feel”, or overall design, of a Joomla Site is controlled by a CSS template.
I’ll create a list of the best sites offering quality free templates which can be installed gratis, and a growing list of templates displayed on a local server from which to choose more quickly. A list of resources on how to modify or create Joomla templates can accompany this.
I will work with users to ensure that their sites well reflect the branding and intent of their enterprise, and I can help with branding development by suggesting logos and graphics.
The first resource I plan to purchase given additional funds is a recently released template editor. Artisteer’s intuitive drag and drop interface allows anyone to easily manipulate templates ($129.95, twice tha price of any other Joomla product I know of).
There are several business suites of plug-ins and extension modules available for nominal fees that allow better e-commerce integration and more options. I also expect to be investing in some of these anyway. The over head of buying Joomla services and products is kept low, for there is always a free option.As the effort acquires more plug-ins, templates, and extension modules, more pages will go up on a central index to show how to use these options.
Socialweb Apps and Promotion
I have tried hundreds of socialweb applications. As the biggest by far, Facebook has proved to be the king in most respects, but social bookmarking is often overlooked as a real help to publicizing and promotion. My Social Web Apps List
Other important resources and information for a neophyte’s web presence include ones about understanding and implementing effective website monetization, promotion, and metrics. This is another skill set that has been made much easier by good technical solutions.
About My Work
All of my own intellectual work is always open source. The Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative Corporation will have every right to use it in perpetuity.
I believe in thorough documentation of work flow, practices, and priorities, to create a durability to my work on structuring information.
Let’s create an infrastructure of resources that will allow us to help people help themselves first, so as to have the resources left to provide expert opinions, advice, and skillful support.
2007; Southway Bait Sales @ http://southwaybaitsales.com/home.htm. Definitely the pinnacle of my hand coding work, I spent ages getting the look and feel I wanted. Unfortunately it still does not function as intended. The creation of a Pay-Pal account, a retail price and shipping cost structure, and the editing of an old VHS vid, all took so long that we lost the password and the will to recover it.
2007; Workhorse Project, some good freinds were looking for a loan to launch a cyber cafe with a catering and delivery site, with computer sales recycling and service as an integral part. This material was quickly designed to help get the loan, which was not in the end granted.
2006; Shiraz Project, I worked hard to propose a site based on current branding and images from print and facilities, they went with a cousin from Chicago wh set them up with a mostly black site. I see they have had it changed again, this is much more what I was working towards but is more subtle and dignified http://www.shirazpersiangrill.com/.
2004; Second commercial site, for local rapper Lil’ Dude, @ http://montesite.net/os/lildude/index.php. I started this one in php with a mind towards being able to add more functionality down the line, nonetheless it still remained largely an html based site. Not only has the artist changed his name, but they have since decided to go without a website of their own. In 2008 he set up a more modern page at http://lildude.net/home.html. It has been good for me to see this young man’s career progress apace, he has worked with many talented music biz veterans. Some errors on the front page result from my header and footer for montesite.net being blocked by the Joomla installation.
2003; First commercial site, for my sister’s business, now defunct, @ http://montesite.net/os/r2/home.html. This would have been much easier to build in a scripted user managed space like this one, but, unaware, I built it in raw html with well over 100 hand coded pages. The shopping cart worked back when we had a live paypal account. My sister’s partner absconded with most of the actual product soon after the site went up, so it was never able to be used as intended.
Drupal is More Complex & Flexible than Joomla, less used, more powerful for custom script and DBs. http://wigp.org/ – The Primary Site I Help Oversee with Others
http://drupal.org/ – The Original Best Nonprofit Oriented Open Source CMS Has Found Much Commercial Use
