Class Introductions

Responses:

James Doran

My wife has described me as a maniacal genius with the attention span of a gnat. Thankfully I had enough of an attention span to complete my Bachelor's in IT from UMass Lowell. Adult Technical Education is my passion. I am 51 years old and work as an Engineering Instructor at the Millstone Nuclear Power Station in Waterford, Connecticut. I am also the site's circuit breaker expert and as such, have taught various classes in circuit breaker maintenance and repair. I have one daughter who is currently a junior at UCONN majoring in Animal Studies. My goal for this course and this program is to combine digital technology with classical teaching methods to bring Adult Technical Training fully into the digital age. Currently, most technical training is done using Power Point, and technical instructors consider themselves on the cutting edge if they can create an entertaining Power Point presentation. In reality, Power Point is essentially an overhead project that changes acetate slides with a mouse click instead of manually. There is so much more out there that can be used for technical education. Presently, I am working on learning a program called "Wire Fusion" which creates interactive 3D models through a drag and drop interface. I maintain a website http://www.nucleartraining.net to serve as a forum for nuclear educators.

I'm looking forward to this course because, at the end of the day, this is what I wish to do. I want to move initial nuclear training to an online environment so that when the bright young minds of the next generation come rolling into the plant, they won't have to be burdened with generic learning and instead can pursue learning their selected field. I was the Human Grape!!