Personal

UPDATE: FOR THOSE OF YOU READING AFTER APRIL FIRST, THIS WAS AN APRIL FOOL’S POST. (See the first line and the last link for confirmation.) Despite today’s date, which will correctly make this post impossible to believe, it is with a mixture of excitement, sadness, and dishonesty that I announce that I am leaving BYU. “Once in a lifetime” opportunities never come for some people. But for me, they have come twice. The first was the opportunity to work at BYU. I suppose most of the readers of my blog have never been to BYU and know little about it other than its affiliation with the LDS (Mormon) church. BYU’s mission statement reads: ...

Utah State University OpenCourseWare is, I believe, the country’s second biggest OCW collection with over 80 courses (MIT OCW is, of course, the largest). USU OCW is consistently in the top five results when Googling for “Utah State University” (with or without quotes). And for four years, Marion Jensen has been the fearless leader of USU OCW. Recently, Marion provided what unfortunately appears to be his final project report: We average as many as 2,000 unique visitors to the site every day from all over the world. We have mirror sites up in Africa, China, and Indonesia (that we know of). Our site has been translated into several languages, and is the third most visited site on the usu.edu domain. Being the OCW director is something I’ve loved doing the last four years. ...

Just a quick update on the BYU Independent Study OCW. A few weeks ago I gave the following initial status report: So far the results are very positive – 85 of the 3500 people who visited the OCW site last month registered for for-credit courses. In other words, 2.4% of people who visited the OCW site during its first month became paying customers of BYU IS. The latest data say that we have now had 5529 visitors to BYU IS OCW and that 136 of those visitors have enrolled in credit-bearing courses. In other words, 2.5% of the people who have visited the OCW site have become paying customers. Remarkably stable, eh? ...

It is with mixed emotion (but certainly a huge amount of excitement!) that I write today to tell you that I have accepted a position at Brigham Young University. I’ll be making the transition over the summer and begin teaching at BYU in the fall. I remain as committed as ever to pursuing my work of increasing access to educational opportunity, and believe that there will be many wonderful opportunities at BYU in this regard. As you know, I am devoting much of my time right now to the Open High School of Utah, which I believe will be a shining example to the world of what the future of open education will be like. ...

My newest boy, sixth month-old Lorenzo, has a shirt that says “Fun To Be Me.” I’m feeling that way lately. This week I was named the USU College of Education and Human Services Researcher of the Year for 2008. It was a huge compliment from my peers here at USU and automatically makes me a finalist for the USU Robins Award, one of the university’s most prestigious (and tradition-rich) annual awards. ...

This is one of the special times of the year when “us Christians” around the world pause for extra reflection on the incredible gift we’ve received from God in His Son Jesus Christ. Even if you aren’t Christian, I’d encourage you to take some time this weekend to “count your blessings.” There’s no feeling in the world like gratitude, and the world needs more people whose hearts are filled with thanks. ...

Many of you know we’ve been expecting a baby. Number five for our family, in case you were keeping score at home. Well, he arrived today safe and sound! A great blessing to our family. One pic below; more available on my Flickr site. Metadata Name: Lorenzo K Chung-Chien Wiley Arrival Date: Oct 27, 2007 Length: 20 inches Weight: 7 lbs 2 oz

Ok, I know I’m too much of a geek for my own good, but this open course about Problem Solving on Large Scale Clusters looked pretty interesting, until I saw the description for Lab 3, at which point it became too interesting: Lab 3. The Goal – Implement PageRank, turn Wikipedia into a giant graph, run PageRank on said graph, run it several more times (ideally until the values converge), return (in a humanly parseable sort of way) the PageRank of all the articles. ...

A rare Sunday post for me. Today in the semi-annual LDS General Conference, Elder Oaks quoted research from a recent study at Columbia’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse about the relationship between teens’ academic achievement and how frequently they eat dinner with their family. BusinessWeek summarized the findings as follows: Their research has found that children who have a regular family mealtime are less likely to smoke, drink, use illegal drugs, experiment with sex at a young age, and get into fights. Further, these children are at lower risk for suicidal thoughts and are more likely to do better in school. Teens that have frequent family dinners are more likely to be emotionally content, to work harder, to have positive peer relationships, and to have healthier eating habits. Family mealtime is the single strongest predictor of academic achievement scores and low rates of behavioral problems, regardless of race, gender, education, age of parents, income, or family size. ...

Logan’s newspaper, The Herald Journal, has been doing top 10 lists this summer. On September 8 HJ writer Kim Burgess did a back-to-school top 10 list of “Classes Every Aggie Should Take,” and I was pleasantly surprised to see my “Blogs, Wikis, and New Media for Learning” on the list. She says: Everyone and his dog has a blog these days. Making yours stand out takes a bit more work…. This course goes over a variety of “web 2.0” technologies including blogs, RSS, wikis, social bookmarking tools, photo sharing tools, mapping tools, audio and video podcasts, and screencasts. You’ll be a YouTube pro by the end of the semester. ...