I'm an information architect and performance support specialist. I design information portals and other tools to help people in their work and often to perform tasks they've never done before. I've done this for five years (along with WBT development projects) under the title "Principal Instructional Designer" for my current employer, SI International, Inc. I did it for four years before that (along with performing usability activities and leading a group that created innovative documentation) as "Manager of Documentation and Usability" for Strohl Systems, Inc.
I began to learn how to do it in 1995 while I was an "Advanced Technical Writer" with Siemens Medical Solutions. I launched this website in May of 1997 to draw together a variety of supporting perspectives.
Prior to pursuing this focus I was an online help specialist, a technical writer and trainer, an operations analyst, and a word processing specialist. My greatest strengths are organizing information and writing.
My academic background is in the humanities. As an undergraduate, I was chosen to participate in a four-year honors program underwritten by the Ford Foundation that emphasized self-directed education. On reflection, the greatest benefit of this education has been having made self-directed education a life-long habit.
Planning to remain in academia, I studied and traveled abroad and then returned to enter a Ph.D. program in comparative religions. Because prospects for professors in the humanities were bleak at the time, though, I terminated with a master's degree, became a college counselor for a few years, and left academia to reorient in the business world.
I found my way into high tech by taking several programing courses at a local computer institute. Since programming didn't appeal to me, I entered the working world by developing expertise in office automation. I did this by taking twelve assignments on twelve different dedicated word processors (Wang, Lanier, IBM, Lexitron, etc.) over the course of a year. Then I became a word processing specialist, an operations analyst, and a technical writer/trainer.
Some of my personal interests are the history of musical theater, cooking (Mediterranean cuisines), turn-of-the-(20th) century French art and art nouveau, the Progressive Movement and New Deal in America, Scandanavian social systems, the history of western civilization and of Jewish civilization, Jungian psychology (and MBPI), Rick Steves' perspective on travel (often supplemented with DK Eyewitness Travel Guides, T'ai Chi Chu'an and Qijong, and holistic health and Chinese medicine. I like to read a variety of things but keep coming back to the New Yorker, history, and biographies. I also love documentaries, books-on-tape, courses by the Teaching Company, NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Weekend Edition - Saturday with Scott Simon, and The Diane Rehm Show.
Posted May 1, 1997