mathieso
Personal
- Real Name
- Kieran Mathieson
- About Me
I love dogs. I have two, Oscar and Renata. And there's the rest of my family. Ann, my beautiful and talented wife, Cullyn, my bright son, and Teagan, a budding artist and wise cracker.
I learned to program in the 1970s, when computers were steam powered. I've kept up ever since, learning FORTRAN, COBOL, assembler, Pascal, BASIC (several versions), dBase, RBase, LISP, Prolog, YAPS, C++, Java, SQL, SAS, PHP, ASP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Also messed with Modula 3, ColdFusion, Python, Ruby, and lots of other stuff. I'm a techno ho. If it's lying around, I'll use it.
Right now, I like to mess with Web stuff, including jQuery, Drupal, and many other things. I'm not so good at aesthetics, but would like to get better.
I've used several CMS, and wrote one a while back. I like Drupal because of:
- Its features, particularly social and taxonomy.
- The solid nature of core.
- Its extensibility - good APIs.
- The community and its processes, such as the patch submission process, and the usability testing process.
I live in Rochester Hills, Michigan, USA. I'm a member of my local Unitarian Universalist congregation (http://paintcreek.org), sing in the choir, and sometimes give sermons. The last one I did was on the effect of context on ethical decisions. More interesting than it sounds. Really!
Business
- Organization Website
- http://www.sba.oakland.edu/faculty/mathieson/
- Organization
- Oakland University
- Organization Profile
I'm associate professor of information systems. I teach courses on client- and server-side Web stuff, and a course introducing information systems to non-technical business students.
My research is all over the place at the moment. I'm interested in IT in ethics, that is, how tech can help people make ethical decisions. I'm also interested in using educational theory to design Web material. Useful ideas include constructivism, levels of description (from phenomenography), deep learning, and social learning. I'm more interested in applying theory to my own content areas, rather than contributing to the theory itself.
Two projects are MIS-Book.Com and CoreDogs.
MIS-Book.Com is a "textbook" for the introductory information systems course taught in business schools. It uses conversations, stories, and humor. It doesn't use constructivist or phenomenographic principles as well as it might. It's a tikiwiki site that I'll move to Drupal eventually.
CoreDogs helps people learn about the core of Web technology. What makes it different from sites like w3schools.com is that CoreDogs follows educational best practices. As Andy Hunt notes in Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, just because someone is a technical expert doesn't mean that s/he can teach. CoreDogs presents technical material in a way that makes learning effective and efficient.
History
- Member for
- 31 weeks 1 day