Six Credits to Go and a Question

Well, here I am with a B.F.A. degree, an M.A. and an Ed.M and down to the last six credits of my long academic career. I am already paying back student loans and I'm not even started with the dissertation or the certification process. I am doing this all rather bass ackwards.

When I started this not-so-brilliant process in 1978 I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker, study with D.A. Pennebaker and work for CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt. Well, that worked out! Pennebaker either quit or was fired before I could study with him, and then I took this long detour into academia and never made it to CBS, but I got the B.F.A. I found that I was a good administrator and that I was pretty happy doing that. Then, around 1994 or so, I decided to go back to school to learn about computers when it became clear to me that digital technology was becoming critical to filmmaking and got an M.A. at Teachers College in 1997, but then I lost my job when there was some academic cost cutting during the dire Moses years at CCNY. Still, the M.A. gave me the credentials to go to another school and I did manage to be one of the first people in the world to introduce digital non-linear post-production to an educational environement, including even digital ADR and sound effects editing. This experience and knowledge allowed me to build what is still the only networked digital non-linear post facility for education in the region, which says less about me than it does about the other schools that aren't doing it. And here is some video of me talking about it. I returned to school (the first day of classes was 9/11/2001, which is another story) to pursue the idea that somehow the combination of networks, or rather Metcalfe's Law, added something dramatically different to the ongoing increases in speed that we see with Moore's Law. Now, with the Ed.M. behind me it is time to attack this problem more systemically and come up with that bane of doctoral students: a question.

A question? It's actually much easier to come up with the answers first, isn't it?