Big news and more big news

In order for this to be a successful blog, I suppose I'm going to have to be a little bit more consistent with my entries. I have lots of things to write about, from politics to sports, but today I'll update the world (or at least the two people that read this) on new happenings in my life.

The first tidbit is that Jennifer and I are going to be having our third kiddo sometime this fall. We just found out last week. This one came as a huge surprise, but that has done nothing to lessen our enthusiasm. We love our two children to death, so adding one more to the mix will be even better. If you have good name ideas, please add comments to this posting.

The second tidbit is that this fall I'll be leaving my beloved department of educational technology at SDSU for the University of Utah. I'll be working in the teaching and learning department as their educational technology guru. Fortunately for me, the department chair, Lynne Schrum, is world famous in my field, so I'll be able to ride her wave to fame. Needless to say, the Molebash family is going to miss San Diego immensely. It really is a fantastic place to live. If we had a little bit more than 800 square feet to live in we would likely stay. I'll miss my Padres and Chargers, Mexican food, Sea World, the Zoo, LegoLand, and the beach. But I'll probably miss the people in my department the most. If I could I'd throw them all in the moving van and take them with me. My buddy, Bernie Dodge, will be especially missed.

SITE Conference recap

Like most SITE Conferences, I wasn't too thrilled with the quality of presentations. I went to as many as possible. Some were good, some were okay, and a few were really really bad. One presenter used the phrase "it might be statistically significant" when comparing text-only mentoring versus text and video mentoring. Since she was using a whopping sample size N=8, I'll give her the bad news...nothing was statistically significant nor was the topic socially relevant.

All righty, enough chit chat about the boring parts of SITE. My presentations went rather well. The two-hour symposium I was a part of was smashing. Six of us presented different components of the Digital Historical Inquiry Project, a federally funded grant project I administer. It was really nice to see all the individual pieces of the grant come together. Some of the cool things you might want to check out include: WIPs, Georgia Digital History Project, Documenting the American South Teacher Page, and HSI: Historical Scene Investigation. The bottom line is I have been blessed to work with so many talented people. The people behind these projects are ones to keep an eye on in the years ahead.

While at the conference I had several good political conversations with people I respect, but I'll save these thoughts for my next post.