Here is an excerpt from my WiTTIE user biography, published in my ECI 301 class.
After years of first-hand experience with computers, I was excited to start high school in 1997 with a school-wide upgrade of Windows 98 just ahead. I’d been reading about it in Wired and couldn’t wait to get my hands on innovative and expansive software. Come my sophomore year, I found that while I was proficient at the new features in what was PowerPoint 97, none of the teachers I was writing papers and constructing slideshows for were. Once word had spread around the English department, the duration of my lunch hour was increasingly spent in the computer lab (what an archaic term!) “teaching” teachers how to use tools and features they’d never thought of in Microsoft Office. Once I had the English teachers proficient in the school’s new software, I thought it would be easier (on my homework-doing and lunch-eating time) to show them how to teach other teachers by writing a series of tutorials for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The tutorials began in excruciatingly simple steps like “Click the File button, hover the cursor on ‘New Document’ and click again,” and progressed nine additional levels to a point where all teachers could calculate grades using formulas in Excel and create a presentation about curriculum efficacy. The English teachers all helped me write up the tutorials, and each department was given a handful of copies. As of 2002, a year after my graduation, they were still being printed!
In my off-time, I began writing more about things I could do that didn’t seem commonplace. Some of my first instructional guides were for mentally converting the notes on a staff between a treble and a bass clef and back again. I eventually wrote more tutorials for software and many originals are still aggregated on imaging tutorial sites like Tutorialized.com today.
After my 14 month instruction at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida, I also authored a paper on designing lessons for training applications titled “Designing Hierarchical Learning Structures for Computer-Based Training”. This collaborative effort with a computer simulation major, Nina Xu, was used in designing many of the classrooms on the FSU campus that enabled students to interact with their instruction in any degree program. It was particularly effective in the digital media, game design and development, and computer simulation programs.