About Techfoot

Techfoot is my personal blog, where I speak only for myself and not for my employer or any other organization.  Most of what I write concerns the use technology in higher education,  the connection between higher education and lifelong learning and about the power of technology to foster creativity, community and collaboration.

Before becoming a full time member of the School of Education faculty, I worked as the director of Academic Information Servcies at the College of William and Mary where my responsibilities included working with the academic technology specialists, our academic engineering team and the members of the lab/ classroom team. Our group assisted over 600 faculty and staff and a growing number of graduate and professional students.

A couple of caveats about my writing:

• I’ve never written two sentences in a row without a typo; I certainly don’t indend to start now.
• Andrew Jackson said, “It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.” I happen to have a damn fine mind that can think of many ways to spell just about anything.

Why Techfoot?

Some years ago when I was looking for some piece of useless information on the web, I came across Blogger–the creation of Evan Williams, who was the founder of Pyra Labs. Pyra was later sold to Google in 2003, and it still serves as the host for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of blogs. I knew a little bit about weblogs, but I don’t think I’d run into the term “blog” before that night. Blogger offered the opportunity to set up your very own blog for free. The hardest parts about the setup were coming up with yet another password and a catchy name. Evan William’s blog was called “Evhead”, and I wasn’t feeling particularly creative so I called that first effort “Techfoot,” and it’s pretty much followed me since.