Resume of Dr. William M. Mitchell
1455 S Greenview Ct
Shelbyville, IN 46176-9248
(317) 392-3038
Retired
as Associate Dean
Professor of Information Science
UALR
2801 S. University Ave
Little Rock, AR 72204-1099
www.ualr.edu/wmmitchell/
ACADEMIC AND ADMINISTRATIVE POSITIONS:
At UALR (6/00-7/04)
2001-2004 Associate Dean, Cybercollege of Arkansas
2000-2001 Director, Information Science Program
2000-2004 Professor of Information Science
At LSU-Shreveport (1/89-5/00)
1993-98
Director, Shreveport Urban Services Consortium
1992-94 Associate Vice Chancellor for Sponsored
Research and Dean of Graduate Studies
1993-94 Interim Director, University Computer
Services
1989-92 Director, MS in Systems Technology
1989-91 Chair, Department of Computer Science
1989- Tenured Professor
of Computer Science
1987-89 Professor of Computer Science
1981-87 Director, M.S. in Computer Science
Education
1978-87 Chair, Department of Computer
Science
1980-86 Tenured Assoc. Prof. of Computer
Science
1980-82 Director, UE Technical Assistance
Center
1977-80 Asst. Prof of Computer Science,
1976-77 Asst.
Prof of Math. Sci., Ball State University, IN
1974-76 Asst. Prof of Math & CS,
Anderson College, IN
1972-74 PT Instr. of Math, UT at Nashville,
TN
1973-74 PT Instr. of Math, Nashville Tech.
Inst., TN
1969-72 Instr. of Math, Dana College, NE
1968-69 Danforth Intern in Math, Earlham
College, IN
1967-68 Instr. of Math, Chicago City
College, IL
EDUCATION
Ph.D.,
Mathematics, 1974, George Peabody College
(graduate minor in Computer Science, Vanderbilt University)
M.S., Mathematics, 1966, University of Tennessee
B.S., Mathematics, 1965, Maryville College, TN
PROFESSIONAL OBJECTIVE Planner, Leader, Teacher, Entrepreneur, Innovator
LEADERSHIP STYLE
I am a goal-oriented, systematic individual. I am a salesman, able to communicate my vision and defend it from detractors. I am a debater, able to look at issues from many viewpoints and evaluate the strengths of different positions. I work well with committees, organizing their work and keeping them on track. I am a creative problem solver, originating solutions based on careful analysis of situations and constraints. I understand systems and appreciate the relationship of parts to the whole. I am a good supervisor, giving clear directions, significant support, and individual responsibility. I have broad experience with a variety of educational situations, both as a faculty member and consultant. I am a demanding teacher with high expectations. I do the work that others miss in order that the effort will be successful.
Most of my accomplishments result from the synergism of my own energy and enthusiasm with volunteers. I have not had much authority or financial resources to work with, but I have always attracted good human resources to my endeavors. I have been a valued staff person because I do not seek credit, but neither do I shrink from blame. I accept criticism, ignore personal animosity and jealousy, and believe the best of my colleagues. I define roles and delegate responsibilities. I ask people to do the things that need to be done (and convince them to accept). I am honest and open, but not extroverted.
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY
I have been associated with higher education continuously since starting college in 1961. I have studied at large and small universities, and I have taught undergraduates for over 30 years. While I have had limited association with research institutions, I have a keen appreciation of scholarship and I have exemplified a high standard of professional activity. I have always been multi-disciplinary, beginning in college, where I majored in Mathematics but minored in Physics, Social Studies, and Philosophy/Religion (completing 158 semester hours in 4 years). Fascination with the learning processes has led me from pursuing new knowledge to seeking to understand how knowledge and skill is acquired. Consequently, I focused on teaching problem solving and then on developing curricula that, by virtue of their organization, facilitated learning. In the process of tracing the internal elaboration of ideas, I discovered the pleasure of orchestrating human activities to accomplish stated goals. .
My efforts as a teacher, a trainer of teachers, and as an academic administrator can uniformly be characterized as presenting a vision or goal that inspires the group, assisting the group to find mechanisms by which the goal can be approached, and locating the resources by which the mechanisms can be implemented. I sell, empower, and step back out of the way, but I monitor and anticipate difficulties, and have ready feasible alternatives when they are required. I am the consultant and "fixer" if things get off track, but I keep attention on the goal and I stay out of the spotlight. My groups succeed, they learn and grow (a dozen of my graduate students have followed my example and assumed leadership roles in professional organizations), and I go on to the next goal. I believe in working smart and working hard, but I choose to devote my energies to activities that I derive satisfaction from.
I have specialized at the introductory level of the curriculum (with a CS0 text) and at the senior level where I have supervised the software projects course (and published several papers on how I teach it). In the past six years I have moved entirely to web-based courses, the most recent of which can be reviewed at my website. My courses are tightly organized with a schedule of topics, but I do not monopolize the class. I expect students to prepare and submit a variety of exercises and present material to their colleagues. Much student work is published on the class website. I also work team activities and role-playing into several of my courses. The goal is to engage the student and to focus her on attaining a defined outcome. Products are important, process is important, and a critical assessment of both the product and process is important. We solve problems starting where we are and with what we have, but we quickly move to assessing if we are making progress and deducing the strength and weaknesses of our initial approach. I strive to remind students to keep the task in context. My problem-solving text grew out of the experience of teaching business students a required programming course and finding that they did not think algorithmically, so they hoped the computer would somehow bail them out. When I first taught them to think algorithmically, they rapidly learned BASIC.
I have also discovered that the problem has to have a critical complexity before it becomes interesting and challenging and thus engages a student's efforts. Little is learned if the material is too piecemeal or too abstract, students simply respond by rote. Problems that unfold with multiple levels become jumping-off points that take different students in different directions. Skill is developed by practice, and memory is essential in bring to bear what is relevant for a situation, so I use routine exercises to build confidence while intermingling various kinds of non-routine problems. Not every student is engaged by the same exercise, so I tend to allow students to weight their efforts according to their interests. For the non-self-directed student I have a stock collection of tasks, but for the engaged student I individualize the course requirements. In my software projects courses I regularly give individualized finals.
I am comfortable with the task of motivating students to work, where effort is measured by results, the acquisition and integration of knowledge and skill. Students should learn responsibility and gain intellectual maturity in my classes, but they should also master content and make progress toward attaining professional competence. We spend time together because they want certification that they have grown to a standard of competence, and they trust my expert judgment that the tasks that I help them accomplish demonstrate such competence.
SYNOPSIS OF ADMINISTRATIVE ROLES
Associate Dean, CyberCollege of Arkansas (July 2001- ). I assist Dean Mary Good by making available a decision-maker and a college spokesman when Dean Good off campus (which is frequently). I am responsible for assessment efforts in the College, working with department chairs and faculty to set up the mechanisms mandated by the Provost and North Central Association. I provide guidance and assistance to the undergraduate programs to help them prepare for professional accreditation (ABET and ACE). I write grants (obtained three years funding from the NSF IT Workforce program) and help others in the college to prepare grant proposals.
Administrator, Shreveport Urban Community Services Consortium, (October 1993-December 1998) As the Principal Investigator of a successful proposal to the Department of Education (one six funded nationally in 1993), I led a steering committee composed of administrators from the Consortium's constituent agencies: the Parish School Board, the Mayor's office, the Chamber of Commerce, and all the public post-secondary educational institutions in Shreveport. The Consortium was a five year, $1.5 million grant to develop education-based initiatives to improve the regional work force. In our first year we focused on completing a Chamber-sponsored vocational education master plan. Other projects included a mobile literacy laboratory, career education in the high schools, small-business internships for college credit, and testing a JTPA-style remediation program in middle school. In the second year the focus shifted toward School-to-Work initiatives. The steering committee provided oversight but I was the sole administrator (half-time) responsible for planning and distributing the grant resources. The Consortium was responsible for establishing a new emphasis on internships on campus (adding a sophomore-level course to the catalog), and it sustained the locally-sponsored Economic Outlook Conference. I represented the Consortium to community leaders in the areas of workforce development and economic growth.
Interim Director, Computer Services, LSU-Shreveport (April 1993-April 1994 ) In this capacity I reported to the Vice Chancellor of Business Affairs and supervised a shop of 10 full-time staff and over 15 students and a budget of $543,000. In the first eight months I oversaw the installation of a fiber-optic backbone on campus, the replacement of a 4361 mainframe with an ES9000, and the inauguration of telephone registration while one programmer short. I hired two programmers (replacing two retirements) and a network technician. Campus-wide e-mail and Internet capability was provided to all administrators and many faculty. I was chosen for this task because I was the author of the campus computing strategy and the most ardent spokes-person for computer technology on campus. Although Computer Services devotes most of its resources to administrative computing and academic computing was decentralized in the colleges, I utilized the fact that I bridged to Academic Affairs to develop and win funding for an academic computing policy and improvements (I purchased $90,000 worth of instructional computers that Spring). A permanent director was appointed in April 1994. After that time I continued for 18 months as the Special Assistant to the Provost for Academic Computing.
Dean of Graduate Studies, LSU-Shreveport (January 1992-June 1994) I chaired the Graduate Council and represented the university on the Executive Graduate Council of the LSU System. Graduate programs are located in the colleges and administered by Deans or their appointees. Graduate courses generate less than 10% of the University’s student credit hours. During my first year I led the Graduate Council to implement a review system for graduate faculty which was applied to all graduate faculty in 1993. In the second year we instituted new policies concerning joint programs with other universities and the policing of senior/graduate offerings. The Council approves all graduate courses and curricula and I assisted the Deans to develop and win permission to add graduate programs. Seven graduate degrees are now offered and four additional cooperative degrees have been negotiated. I prepared the graduate portions of the catalog. This was a new position created in the Provost's Office when I was appointed. The subsequent Provost decided that Graduate Studies was not as important as Institutional Research, and she reorganized me out of the Academic Affairs Office . A third Provost has gotten along without either a Dean of Graduate Studies or a Director of Institutional Research .
Associate Vice Chancellor for Sponsored Research, LSU-Shreveport (January 1992-June 1994). I was responsible for faculty and staff-generated external funding projects (which are distinct from the fund-raising done by the Vice Chancellor for University Relations). During my tenure I hired two grant writers to assist me to help the faculty and staff prepare proposals to external agencies, mostly federal. Prior to my filling this position faculty were on their own to identify and respond to RFPs. Most successful were Mathematics and Chemistry, who in the early 1990's won five grants worth a total of $300,000 for summer instruction of high school students and teachers. In my first year assisting faculty, we won multi-year Department of Education grants for International Studies and Leadership Development, $300,000 in state grants in Education, Business, and Chemistry, and smaller grants for our library and museum. We assisted a Mathematics professor obtain $50,000 a year from multiple sources to fund a summer program for minority middle school students (winning the professor a national award). We finished high in an NIH Bridge proposal and in a comprehensive teacher education proposal to DOE. In my final academic year we were notified of $1 million in awards. I reviewed most budgets, set guidelines for the staff, and concentrated on helping faculty meet deadlines. In July of 1994 the senior grant writer that I hired was named Director of Grants and I was returned to the faculty where I have assisted the grant writers in the College of Sciences and have continued my own successful grant solicitation efforts.
Chair, Department of Computer Science, LSU-Shreveport (September 1989-December 1991). I gave up the chair position to move to Academic Affairs, but during my tenure the department made major strides. The undergraduate computer science program had been cited for low quality in 1987, but was accredited by CSAB in 1991 (becoming one of 119 that year, nationally, and was re-accredited this summer). Eight faculty published one paper and one abstract before I arrived, but they published 13 in the next three years (and 13 more in the following three years--the lesson took). As chair I introduced GIS on campus and initiated contracting with Barksdale Air Force Base. I influenced a new Provost to establish a University Computer Committee, and I convinced them to adopt a strategy for campus computing, which my subsequent duties allowed me to implement. I solicited $50,000 in donated computer hardware and created a local advisory council. I re-did the department's planning procedures and organization, revised the curriculum, and wrote a guide to the major which has been desktop published and distributed to students ever since. I was one of five chairs in the College of Sciences.
Director, MS in Systems Technology, LSU-Shreveport (January 1989-December 1992) I was drawn to LSU-Shreveport by the opportunity to become the first director of a new masters program which was started on Barksdale Air Force Base. The program had been approved only after considerable in-fighting by the Board of Regents, and had offered one semester when I arrived. I re-designed the curriculum, won approval of the Graduate Council for the changes, and developed recruitment and advising materials. I regularly taught two core courses and advised all matriculants, doubling the enrollment in two years (despite Desert Storm) to a steady state of 50 military and civilian students a semester with an average of 5 graduating each term. I relinquished the Directorship after one year as Dean of Graduate Studies. The program requires 30 hours and a comprehensive exam, and seeks to equip the Air Force officer to enter civilian employment in a leadership role in a computer applications area.
Chair, Department of Computer Science, University of
Evansville (September 1978-June 1987).
Director, MS in Computer Science Education, U of E
(January-1982-September 1988).
Director, University of Evansville Technical Assistance Center
(June 1980-June 1982).
ACCOMPLISHMENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF EVANSVILLE: I designed and implemented two BS degrees and two MS degrees in computing within the College of Engineering and Computing Science and these programs graduated 300 undergraduate majors and 120 masters students over the ten years ending 1989. The department grew from two to eight full-time faculty before enrollment decline in 1986 (I was only Ph.D. during most of that period). In 1983-85 the department accoun4ed for 40% of the student credit hours generated by the College. The Technical Assistance Center brokered the consulting expertise of faculty and students to regional industries. We conducted mostly environmental studies. I was eventually replaced by a full-time director.
SYNOPSIS OF ACADEMIC ROLES
I have devoted my professional career to raising the standards of academic performance in undergraduate computing education. This has been evidenced in the curricula that I have implemented at UALR, LSU-Shreveport and the University of Evansville, and also in my service to the teaching community. My first task at UALR was to revise the Information Science program, obtaining University-level approvals, and developing a new brochure. I then recruited and hired six faculty, a Distinguished Professor, an Associate Professor who took over the chairmanship, two Assistant Professors and two Instructors.
Retraining. During the 1980’s I created and conducted summer programs for teachers from small colleges at the University of Evansville with the sponsorship of DPMA and Prentice Hall. I illustrated to these faculty what a high quality computer science program entailed and I traveled to their campuses to encourage them and their administrators to set high expectations. I developed a course on the issues in the undergraduate computing curriculum in which I made clear the contribution and emphasis of two-year and four-year programs and the viewpoints of the engineering and business communities. I have received service awards from DPMA, ACM, and IEEE. I have participated as an evaluator of each of the DPMA/AITP model curricula and I was a founding director of EDSIG
Accreditation I was a program evaluator for CSAB in its first year of operation and a team leader in its second year. I have chaired three teams and served as evaluator on six others besides hosting three team visits to LSU-Shreveport. I have also served as a pre-visit consultant to departments preparing for accreditation (successfully). I was chosen to participate as a program evaluator for the first test of the 2000 guidelines in 1998 and again in 1999. I have an intimate understanding of the vision and goals of the CSAB model of professional computer science programs and a very practical knowledge of their standards and interpretations. I have served as evaluator for CSAB and ABET in both comprehensive and doctoral universities. I have been trained as an Information Systems evaluator.
The Consortium for Computing in Small Colleges Because there was no voice for small colleges, I created a voice. From my experience in summer retraining I recognized the need for inexpensive, regional computing conferences that would publish the kind of pedagogical papers that small college faculty have the opportunity to write. With the help of the Sloan Foundation I organized a one-day symposium in conjunction with NECC and from the nearly 200 attendees in Dayton, Ohio I received the motivation to form a journal and then a conference. The Consortium is now in its fourteenth year and hosts six regional conferences annually with more planned. I served as its initial president and journal editor, and have continuously participated in the national board meetings as the Conference Coordinator. Although it is growing steadily (nearing 600 subscribers) and is fully peer refereed, the JOURNAL FOR COMPUTING IN SMALL COLLEGES does not attract as many submissions as it wishes, so I have directed all of my papers to it in the past decade, becoming its most published author. I have served continuously on its board of directors for 17 years and am presently involved in assisting in the formation of its 9th regional conference.
Professional Associations I retain my contact with the computing industry through consulting and by actively supporting my local computing associations, which, in Evansville and Shreveport have been DPMA/AITP. I spent a semester with Boeing Computing Services in Seattle, billed 800 hours to ICON in nine months, and took a year's leave to try to set up a dot.com telecommunications company (GESTALT, LLC). For two years I was the organizer of the Greater Shreverport ACM Chapter, and I recently organized the Mid-South College Computing Conference, Inc.
SUMMARY OF SCHOLARSHIP IN COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION
PRELUDE TO PROGRAMMING: PROBLEM SOLVING AND ALGORITHMS (Reston, 1984) A textbook developed to introduce freshman an non-majors to the kind of procedural thinking which is required to program a computer. It begins with solving puzzles, introduces systematic approaches to problem solving, then explores languages which express giving unambiguous directions (flowcharts, decision tables, structured English). It concludes with a light introduction to proving programs (loop invariants and how to reason about the generality of the statement of an algorithm)
In INTERFACE, THE COMPUTER EDUCATION QUARTERLY:
4 articles as editor of the Computer Engineering Corner (1982)
13 articles as editor of the Retraining Corner (1983-88)
1 article on teaching service courses (1979)
In SIGCSE BULLETIN (all peer reviewed and presented at National Symposiums)
3 papers on retraining college faculty in computing (1983-86)
5 papers on curriculum in CS (1977-89)
In JOURNAL OF COMPUTING IN SMALL COLLEGES (editor 1985-86)
6 papers on curricula (1986-87)
23 papers peer reviewed and presented at regional conferences (1989-03)
The full text of twenty-one of my paper and panel presentations appear in the ACM Digital Library.
Ten other invited articles for EDSIG NEWS, Small College Creativity, NECC, ASME, History of Scientific Information Systems, etc. (1986-2004)
Speeches, Lectures, and Consulting:
19 different groups have invited me to make presentations to them about computing or computer science education, all but three requiring me to travel out of town. Most paid my expenses and a few gave me an honorarium.
I spoke on 42 different college campuses in conjunction with my duties in supervising graduate students while at the University of Evansville. Most of these talks have been to computing students and faculty.
I have served as a paid curriculum consultant or external evaluator for 16 different colleges and universities. In 1997 I consulted for 10 month (800 billed hours) with Industrial Controls Corporation of Shreveport. I was the server engineer responsible for network design on the Totally Integrated Manufacturing Environment developed for the U.S. Army.
In 1998-1999 I took a leave a absence to help form Gestalt Group, LLC, a company which was to focus on high-end video conferencing applications in manufacturing applications. I served as the Chief Technical Officer and the Chief Manager of the LLC, but the effort failed to obtain adequate funding. I returned to teaching full-time for the 1999-2000 school year.
Upon my return to teaching I assisted my department colleagues to equip our labs via competitive proposals for equipment submitted to the Louisiana Board of Regents’ Educational Support Fund. In my own area of Software Engineering I was funded in 1997 by NSF and the Board of Regents for $33,000 to set up a collaboration server that I used to teach all my courses. In the next year I wrote another pair of successful proposals to introduce H.323 video-conferencing technology to campus, receiving a total of $123,600 from the same two sources. While on leave in 1999 I collaborated with the Center for Biomedical Technology Innovation on a proposal for a web-based information system for medical specialists that was not funded by NIH. A proposal to NSF for collaboration on student assessment with Acxiom Corporation was well reviewed but declined at UALR, but NSF has provided $227,000 to support the development of a database to track student recruitment and retention in the CyberCollege over three years.
Graduate Courses Created and Taught:
Theory of Programming (UE, 1986-1988) Introduced future computer science faculty to formal logic and its application to documenting and reasoning about program code.
Computer Science Education (UE, 1981-88) Surveyed the literature of Computer Science and Information Systems and analyzed national curriculum models and recommendations.
Introduction to General Systems Theory (LSU-S, 1989-93) Surveyed the literature of General Systems Theory from original sources, then applied the concepts to problem solving and to systems management in the context of computer systems.
Decision Support Tools (LSU-S, 1989-92) Studied the use of computer-based decision systems in various contexts and the essential features their design, focusing on effective user interfaces for this application.
Expert Systems (LSU-S, 1997) Modernized an outdated course by identifying a host of web resources and tools.
Thesis Supervision:
Supervised 96 graduates of MS in Computer Science Education program at University of Evansville 1982-1988 (these students published 74 papers written under my direction). The MS in Systems Technology Program at LSUS is non-thesis.
I chaired the initial oversight committee for the Applied Computing track of the Ph.D. in Applied Science at UALR and have continuously served on both the Graduate and Undergraduate College Curriculum committees