It’s me, Lisa. Let me share a bit about myself with you. Academically I have been blessed to work in the field of Human Resources since obtaining my Bachelor of Business Administration, and Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership, both with an emphasis in Personnel Management Degree from The University of Toledo. I started as a Human Resources Clerk, progressed to a Specialist, moved forward as a Generalist, then to Manager, Director and Vice President level positions. These positions have been in public, private, and academic areas and have dual certifications as a senior certified human resources professional. I obtained international certifications by accredited Resources certifying bodies. With this success, there was still this lingering inkling to pursue my doctorate degree, not for work, as it is not required, but to fulfill a personal goal that I suppressed for over a decade.
In my places of employment; community boards and in my volunteer efforts I have been fortunate to participate and/or lead strategic HR planning, develop policies and procedures, enforce internal rules and ensured compliance with federal and state laws, challenged bias, I have evaluated and worked to impact employee performance; I have promoted inclusion and fought discrimination so that the seed of a dream I had in my youth could be realized in my maturity as a continual effort to ensure equal access to education, housing, employment, and compensation. Coursework as an undergraduate and graduate student has helped shape the very foundations of who I am as a person, a professional and community leader, but with all of this, it did not equip me to fully know or understand technology trends, so I look forward to learning more during this course.
I am a second year doctoral student within the Leadership Studies program at Bowling Green State University and I love it. But please,……let me be completely transparent, when I began my undergraduate degree in the 1980’s when obtaining information meant referring to hard bound encyclopedias, physically going to a library or bookstore and student interaction meant face to face meetings and conversations or home line telephone conversations and when typing papers, it was done on a Brother ‘typewriter’ with a piece of carbon paper sandwiched in between two sheets of typing paper. One big error in typing, or skipping of transcribing a sentence meant starting all over again.
Computers were not readily available in the home. Use of computers later in my undergraduate days involved saving to a floppy disk. Email and the internet had either not yet been created or not existing for the vast majority. While there were ‘pagers’, they were not readily available and cell phones for most of the population, and of course e-tablets and portable smart phones were non-existent.
My journey to begin this terminal degree program was intimidating. The process is more than the vast amount of literature to read and theories with which I am to become familiar, but the significant technology changes that have happened since I complete my Master’s Degree in 1996, is astonishing. No longer must I flick through library classification index cards in a Dewey decimal drawer system, to find author/book names and where to look on the shelves to find a book or see if it is available or checked out.
Now I can search the Bowling Green State University libraries on my e-device on or off campus and further the OhioLink system to borrow from other libraries. Now I can type and move sentences, paragraphs or pages of writing from one place to another with a click and drag of a mouse; I can save articles I find on sites like RefWorks, and I can communicate verbally or by text on the phone, or email, or share items via email or a document storage box like DropBox or OneDrive, and let’s not forget skype and/or conference call or web presence software. No more are we using overhead transparencies placed on a projector, but there is Power Point and Prezi and more. My journaling no longer needs to be bound hard copy book, but can be shared on a blog or a post and sent electronically.
Blogging is completely new for me, so this is my first entry or effort. I am excited for this journey and I pray that the journey is good to me along the way. Feel free to join me and share in my experiences.
Lisa D.
