Site Updates Redux
Development on this site will hopefully get started over the next few days. It has been a busy summer of changes both at Bethel University and in our family lives as we prepare for the birth of out third son. Needless to say this site has taken the brunt of the neglect. Now that the semester is almost here I am quickly trying to tie up a number of projects, and updating this site is one of those such projects!
Summer Update
Now that the semester is over I will have some time to make some major updates to this site. Besides updating the content one of my major goals is make brianthacker.com iPad friendly since I have been given one by the IT department at Bethel to test. I am also going to be reinstating the Courses section so I can develop the curricula for my courses.
On-line Courses Available…
Bethel University
…but only to Bethel University students. At the moment they are just shells with some content, but soon will have much more. With the upcoming Labor Day Holiday, I should have more time to commit to updating that content. I will be placing a link to the course section on the side bar shortly, but in the mean time you can find them at http://courses.brianthacker.com.
Course Examples Coming Soon!
WP Logo
This site was created to replace my last one located at “musictech.uncg.edu”. UNCG has decided to move all of the computers on campus to private subnets (which should have been done years ago), to help alleviate hacking, improve security, etc. With that move my personal site would no longer be accessable so I created this one hosted off-campus. On my original site I had examples of using a Course Management System (or Learning Management System depending on your druthers…) to create web based components for traditional face to face courses. This was primarily provided for the faculty I support to provide them with ideas on using technology in the classroom. On that site I used Moodle as the framework to demonstrate several different aspects of my abilities, from system administration, coding, content creation and so forth . When I moved the site, I initially installed Moodle to continue hosting my courses, but I haven’t had the time to code a matching theme for it. Now that WordPress.org and WordPressMU are merged as of the 3.0 release the decision to drop Moodle and migrate my materials over to WP subdomains was made. While it is not a CMS or LMS, it is flexible enough for me to continue showing on-line examples without the need to maintain and administer two separate web frameworks. Other benefits include a consistent theme throughout the site, aesthetic principal that is important to me, less time spent on site administration, and more time on content creation.
Article Series
In the near future I will be working on a series of articles for this website on a number of different music (and possibly MegaSquirt) related topics, though I reserve the license to write on other topics as well! For the first series, I am reworking a paper I wrote several years ago on early Dixieland and Swing trombonists, focusing on four individuals in particular and providing basic information on several others for future research when time permits. I have not seen much if anything on this topic in the International Trombone Association Journal, and since they seem to be publishing less historical content, have not bothered to submit it to that publication. If after reworking the paper into this series I think it might have potential I may submit it and see what happens!