Academic Portfolio

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 underdevelopement, 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.

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.

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 imagry. In the meantime I intend to spend my summer learning Macromedia.

      Self -employed and Subcontracting
1990 - Present       Minglewood Unlimited       Wauwatosa, Shorewood, and Milwaukee, Wi.
Web design and site maintenance, structural painting and restoration, woodworking, arts, crafts, jewelry, and odd jobs.

      Instructor's Assistant
Spring semester 2004       UWM School of Information Studies       Milwaukee, Wi.

      Bartender:
12/01-2/02       Clique Soul Club       Milwaukee, Wi.

01/01-9/01       Shanahan's Irish Pub       Milwaukee, Wi.

      Waste Water Floatation Treatment and Recycling
6/00 -1/01       Institech / ITU       New Berlin, Wi.

      Injection Mold Set-up:
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.

      Carnival Ride Operator and Maintenance, Structural Maintenance
1978 -1997       Fun Festivals / Ray Letourneau       Milwaukee, Wi.
Building, apartment, and ride maintenance, remodeling, some electrical.
Storage, loading, driving, set up, and operation of rides.
Billing, inventory, and cashiering.

      Field Medical Laboratory Technician
1984-1990       Army National Guard / Army Reserves       Milwaukee and Madison Wi.
Basic technique in urinalysis, bloodwork, cell culture, parasitology, and phlebotomy.

      Assistant Manager
8/89-7/90       Corn Dog On A Stick       Madison, Wi.
Supervision, inventory, receipts, reorders, and customer service.

2000       Wisconsin Bartending College       Milwaukee, Wi.
Bartending

1985-1988       U.W.       Madison, Wi.
History, Anthropology, Political Science. No degree - insufficient funds.

1984-1985       Academy Of Health Science       San Antonio, Tx.
Basic Medical Lababoratory 92B BML10. Army National Guard

1978 -1982       Wauwatosa East High School       Wauwatosa, Wi.
Advanced studies in Science and English.

On request at geanark@gmail.com
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