Okay, maybe more than just a few words, but hello again and welcome to my site!

As I look back on my years of work, I can't help feel a sense of satisfaction. Have I been successful? Were there ups and downs? The answer is yes and yes. My husband and I live in a one-hundred-year-old farm house on three acres of land, something I never thought we'd be able to do. At this stage of my work life, I've been fortunate to accumulate a modest body of rewarding design work, a more modest body of writing, and I've been able to touch and shape the way things are - Purdue's irb website, for instance, or the instructional labs trouble system or CFRC's intranet. I've reached a place where I can consider management, and analysis and design theory from the perspective of my own work experience (watching the desktop revolution "grow up") together with the perspective of my degree work in two different disciplines, Computer Programming Technology and Instructional Design, so that I can formulate and contribute my own insights into best practices. That’s not to say I wouldn’t benefit from (and greatly appreciate) continued opportunities for interaction with colleagues from my field and further education and professional development along these lines. I've been blessed to work with outstanding, highly skilled, inspirational, creative, and supportive people from various walks of life, to try new things, to venture, to play with new toys, and to "push the edge." :) And yet, I've also been able to set down roots and live where I could look in and look after family and friends. But I've also experienced the "corporate nomad" life - in my growing up years, my dad, a mining geologist, worked in Mexico, South America, and all over the U.S. so I got to see and live in a lot of different places.

I worked for 22 years at Purdue University in various capacities - administrative, programming, systems analysis, support, and training (1981 - 2003). I currently work at Community & Family Resource Center, a not-for-profit social services agency, for a former boss from Purdue who is now Controller at CFRC. Before we leave the subject I will mention that I earned two degrees while I worked at Purdue - an Associates degree in Computer Programming Technology (1991), and a Master's in Educational Technology (2003) to complement my Bachelor's in Speech Education from Bob Jones University (1972). My Master's project and graduate assistantship was designing instruction in the area of Compliance training. During this period I also did some free-lance consulting work for a local not-for-profit agency and collaborated with a professor on a paper for InfoSecCD 2005.

I guess everybody wants to make a significant and lasting contribution in some way - My husband has worked in construction much of his life. He can point to various buildings around town that he has helped build since the 1960's. He also refinishes and repairs antique furniture and wagons, people's beloved family heirlooms. In the IT field acheiving that kind of product durability is particularly difficult, due to the rapid nature of technology change on newer platforms. That's why it's gratifying to see that some of my work has endured (even if some of the links change from time to time and occasionally break this Portfolio ;) - albeit not the name of Purdue's IRB website. There's also the Student Subject Video, certain aspects of the instructional labs trouble reporting system, and the PACUC online orientation. And I have actively maintained a community website for an international group for ten years. That's eons in cyberspace time! While others have improved and made changes to my work, that's all as it should be. When we lay a solid foundation or manage to discover how a few pieces of the puzzle fit together in the space-time continuum that we occupy, others can build upon what we've done. Besides, none of us design in a void - almost always someone else has broken ground before us.

"Neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase." —1 Corinthians 3:7

As I have already mentioned, I currently serve as Grants Compliance Specialist for two not-for-profit agencies Community Family and Resource Center (CFRC) and Tippecanoe County Child Care. There is a huge educational and technical component to this position. I am also co-owner of a small furniture refinishing business Second Looks. Besides my current position and my years at Purdue, I worked as a junior-high speech and English teacher in the Indiana public school system, and for a faith-based not-for-profit organization, Teen Haven, in Philadelphia, PA.

In my long and rich work experience, I've had ample opportunity to collaboratively design and discover solutions for many types of businesses, including compliance, healthcare, education, and warehouse, on many different systems and development platforms. I continue to actively grow my technical, instructional, and web skills by maintaining a membership with ISTE and by studying such technolgies as Visual Basic, XML, PHP, JavaScript, ASP, and SQL SERVER with an eye not only toward using them at work but also applying them to several websites I actively maintain, including:

But best of all, at this stage of my life, I have built-in flexibility, and the option of branching out in many different directions - from doing technical development and design, to writing grants, to educating and teaching, and even marketing. It's a good place to be. Thanks for stopping by!

Jeanne

In case you arrived here through the back door ...