Goal Statement

It wasn't supposed to be a Master's degree in Education.

Years ago, I thought I'd take a year off – some day – and get a Master's degree in Journalism. I grew up wanting to be a sportswriter and I always figured I'd add another Journalism degree, you know, to take a break from the grind. Eventually, I became a sports editor, and I kept thinking about getting an MBA. The degree was sexy in the 1980s and 1990s, and seemed like a way of jumping high in the management ranks.

I never pursued it because, frankly, statistics bored me – as did budgets and accounting.

I left the newsroom, turned an extra bedroom into a home office, and with a 10-year-old Mac, became a webmaster. Working for myself, I worked through the night many times, teaching myself HTML, JavaScript, Flash, ActionScript. I was always the smartest person in the room (the dog and cats were no match), but I found I was re-inventing the wheel every day. I had no one with whom to share knowledge. I started attending conferences and workshops, and I learned at an exponential rate. Soon, I was working again in the corporate world, guiding companies in interactive strategy.

But still I'm alone. Because the Web is so young, companies hire just one person like me. When I'm working on Google ranking strategy, or figuring out best practices in Flash, I may as well be back in that spare bedroom – I'm all alone again. Sure, blogs are a terrific way to learn what another person's thinking, but it's difficult to get a reliable (and correct) answer to your own questions.

Then I "discovered" the Educational Instructional Technology program at GMU. I'm looking forward to learning from and collaborating with students and professors in standards and best practices for the web and interactive applications. At last: an environment where we're all thiking interactively.

And a degree in Education is appropriate: The Web is all about learning new information.