John McDaris
Geoscience Content DeveloperScience Education Resource Center - Carleton College
507-646-5749, jmcdaris@carleton.edu
I started at SERC in September, 2003, and began by working on a couple of projects, including writing a module on instructional web design, enlarging our example collection of Investigative Case Based Learning activities, supervising our student workers and general web site maintenance.
Now, I am a primary contact for several of our DLESE Community Services websites (Teaching Quantitative Skills, Preparing Teachers to Teach Earth Science, and Using Data in the Classroom) as well as the Building Strong Geoscience Departments website. I am also the webmaster for the National Association of Geoscience Teachers website which we host here at SERC. I continue to work with faculty editors on a number of our projects to help move materials from inspiration to completion. Sometimes this entails actual content development and other times it involves being in contact with faculty to keep everything progressing. As always, I am a jack-of-all-trades, pulling together bits of content development, site design, digital catalog maintenance, office management, and supervision.
I've also become our "quick response team" for building new content related to geologic or natural disasters around the globe. Two examples of this response can be found in the Tsunami and Hurricane visualization collections.
I have come to web design as a by-product of being in college during the 1990s (making and learning from some truly awful personal pages in the process) and absorbing a lot about computers and technology as a corollary to my scientific training. I did my graduate research in mineral physics and have been a rock hound for many years, but my scientific interests run the gamut. Working at SERC has given me the opportunity to learn a lot about education theory and practice that I didn't pick up in grad school.
Outside of work, I devote a lot of time to renovating the early 1900s era home I share with my partner, I participate in recreational running and softball, and I'm a (supra-amateur/sub-professional) singer involved in a number of choirs and choral ensembles.
Before Starting at SERC, I spent three years working in business and office administration for the YMCA of Metropolitan Minneapolis.
Education
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN - Geophysics, M.S., 2000
North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC - Physics, B.S. cum laude, 1997
Publications
Curriculum Vitae (Acrobat (PDF) 80kB Jun5 06)
