A Virtual Portfolio

Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Community Columnist (2005, 2008 – 8 columns)

• Why must a federal case be made out of using bad words? (Nov 10, 2008)
  Every three decades or so, there’s a federal case over broadcasting bad language. The most recent was on Election Day before the Supreme Court.
• Semantic pollution fouling the airwaves (Aug 9, 2008)
  Chesapeake Energy’s impressive and expensive PR campaign has folks asking questions. Lots of questions.
• But what if … ? (May 10, 2008)
  The local community had an opportunity to go beyond talking about talking about race. Instead, we passed to avoid the front page, content to be merely a footnote.
• The Texas Spring Palace and the fall of a brave man (Feb 2, 2008)
  An obscure monument south of downtown Fort Worth recalls a progenitor of the Stock Show and the tragedy that occurred there.
• Friendship: football, band, church and a major question (Nov 12, 2005) You never know what will come after the question, “Do you want to hear my story?”
• A long, winding stream (Aug 27, 2005)
  Don’t like feeling like a fish flopping on an August sidewalk? Don’t give up hope.
• The code of our country (May 28, 2005)
  In 21st-century America, honor is an option — not necessary, not sufficient, desirable only if it doesn’t jeopardize the bottom line.
• A word by any other name (Feb 26, 2005)
  Changing words doesn’t change what they refer to — but it may change attitudes.

SantaFe.com (the From Here to Discernity blog, 2011)

• Rolling Stones of Broken Beliefs
• Learning is for Noobs
• Adherence to Appearance
• Indian Market: Why this and not that?
• The Cross That Came Before
• What a Marriage a Difference Makes

Books and Journals

“Suspended in Stereotypes,” published in a book of essays edited by A.M. George and T. Thomason, Race, gender and other stereotypes: A reader for professional communicators.

Capitalizing on Career Chaos: Bringing Creativity and Purpose to Your Work and Life, by Helen Harkness, PhD. Dr. Harkness was a pioneer in the field of personal career counseling/coaching specializing in mid-career adults. For her third book, she used the metaphor of chaos theory as a theme to apply her career change principles to career disruption. Throughout the book she uses specific de-identified client examples. I’m proud to say that I’m included. This page (offsite) provides extracts of the book that I contributed. Dr. Harkness died in 2021, just shy of her 93rd birthday.

“8 Passages for Uncertain Career Journeys”, published in the Career Planning and Adult Development Journal in 2011.

Here’s Something About General Semantics: A Primer for Making Sense of Your World, my 2009 self-published eBook in which I present my views on the fascinating, mostly-misunderstood and often-misrepresented study of differences that make a difference.

The MOOC

In 2014, I collaborated with two colleagues from Indiana and Utah to develop a Massive Open Online Course (or MOOC), offered on the Canvas Network. The course is still available in the network’s archives, but I’ve also migrated the content below to my ThisIsNotThat.com section of this site.

• The archived course on the Canvas Network,General Semantics: An Approach to Effective Language Behaviors (offsite).
• The home page for the re-formatted course on ThisIsNotThat.com.
• An index of course webpages (an outline of the course).
• “Our First MOOC” presented at the 2014 InstructureCon conference, four months after the MOOC closed, discussing our MOOC experiences .

Educational Psychology

I completed the Master of Arts (MA) program in Educational Psychology at the University of New Mexico as an Outstanding Graduate in 2012.

From the catalog: The program is designed to give students a broad and critical perspective on the psychological factors affecting individuals in schools, other educational settings, and other learning situations throughout the life span. The program also emphasizes critical evaluation and application of research and theory based on a firm grounding in measurement, assessment, research methodology and quantitative methods.

The following are all unpublished papers submitted for course work.

• Chasing the Golden Unicorn: A Critique of Objectivist Educational Research, 2012
• From the “Approved Solution” to a Dynamic Mosaic: Personal Reflections on the Accelerating Evolution of Education, 2012
• Implications of Neuroscience for Education (paper and video presentation), 2011
• Evaluation of the Strong Interest Inventory, 2011
• A Proposal to Evaluate the Graduate Student Writing Studio (Program Evaluation project), 2010
• Racial Color-Blindness and Context-Blindness (Quantitative Research Prospectus), 2010
• A Methodological Review of Muslim American Youth: Understanding Hyphenated Identities through Multiple Methods by Selcuk R. Sirin and Michelle Fine, 2010
• Muraling Myths: A Qualitative Research Prospectus, 2010 [the 4 panels of the mural are to the right]
• WWbhD: What Would bell hooks Do? (Regarding the Kenneth Adams murals in the Zimmerman Library, University of New Mexico), 2010 [the 4 panels of the mural are shown to the right]
• Changing Thinking (Reaction to Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society>, 2010
• Problem-Posing vs. Problem-Solving (Comments on Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed), 2010
• On Conformity: Emerson and Thoreau Respond to Mann? (Comments prompted by Horace Mann’s On the Art of Teaching), 2010
• Educational Psychology Program Application Letter, 2010

Media Exposure

Re-posted and formatted for this site.

• It’s a study of how lives (in so many words) — Fort Worth Star-Telegram (August 2002)
• Brimming with knowledge — Dallas Business Journal (July 2003)
• Avoiding dating disasters — Dallas Morning News (December 2003)
• from Capitalizing on Career Chaos by Helen Harkness (published May 2005)
• He takes little at face value — Dallas Morning News (November 2006)
• Think before your speak — Daily News & Analysis, Mumbai, India (November 2007)
• National Workshop on General Semantics — DIVYA BHASKAR DAILY, Gujarat, India (November 2007)
• Report on the National Workshop on General Semantics — Centre for Contemporary Theory, Vadodora, Gujurat, India (November 2007)
• Mention in Burle Pettit’s “Between the Dots” column, Lubbock Avalance-Journal (February 1973)

Online Newsletter

From 1999 into 2003, I published 34 issues of an online collection of observations, homilies, and lessons learned I called Chanticleer Calls (index). The name was inspired by Thoreau’s self-aware mission statement in his Walden: I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.

Quotes

To know me is to understand the quotes I’ve collected throughout my life. I believe, as a whole, they comprehend a consistent and defendable world view.

General

• Resume
• CV (Curriculum Vitae), or Curriculum Vitae (CV)
• The One-Minute Poem (my ‘white whale’)
• ThisIsNotThat.com – Previously a separate website started in 1999, primarily about general semantics, including the 2014 MOOC I co-developed and presented. In 2022 it was incorporated into this site.