Moving on from MIT

[bkdelong]

I have been with the MIT OpenCourseWare project for over 3 years. I joined as a temp worker in August 2002 to help bring the 50-course pilot online during which I spent a full 24 hours on launch day to make sure we were up on time.

I played an integral part in setting HTML and CSS authoring standards, processes for making PDFs and participating in some of the efforts to better use the massive amount of metadata we were collecting.

As I finish a very large accessibility retrofitting project, (due to be made live this month), I feel a sense of completion - since from day 1 of my involvement I had always advocated Web accessibility as part of the process rather than an afterthought.

Just as we had to create the initial Web site using tables for layout due to time, we weren't able to fully complete all my desired modifications such as bring our site to XHTML 1.1 instead of XHTML 1.0 Transitional, changing our external linking policy to no longer use the deprecated "target=_blank" attribute and fixing some of the markup errors and falacies caused by MSCMS 2002's implementation of the .NET framework.

However, I've learned an incredible amount working for MIT OCW and met a lot of great people. As I wait for the OpenCourseWare movement to grow and development of a consortium to come together, it's time to take these skills, my talents, passion and drive to another organization that can use what I've learned and know in addition to continue teaching me through my lifelong learning process.

Those of you who may be wonder why I've suddenly come out of the woodwork everywhere, now know why. I took pride in my ability to have my hands in all sorts of projects scattered around the Web and I sometimes regret losing touch with those innovative ideas while I had my head down at MIT.

I've posted my latest "CV" to LinkedIn - one of the few Social Networking applications in my mind that has truly succeeded. I encourage you to check out the service.

I'll let everyone know what I'm up to as I've already had all sorts of leads and interesting projects come my way. I hope they will continue to pour in.