About
The long way here
I've been a trombonist for thirty years. I earned a master's in music at the University of Tennessee, taught jazz improvisation for the better part of a decade, spent five years in IT — helpdesk through Canvas administration — and landed in instructional design, where all of it turned out to be relevant.
Teaching improvisation settled the conviction that runs through everything I build: people don't learn from content. They learn from well-sequenced experiences. A course, a study tool, a SCORM lesson — each one is an attempt to sequence a hard skill the way a good teacher would, at a scale no single classroom reaches.
The IT years contribute the other half. When an interactive misbehaves inside an LMS, I don't file a ticket. I open the console. Most of what's in the Work section exists because something needed to survive a migration, a sanitizer, or a semester of unattended use — and the pipelines that made that possible turned out to be as interesting as the lessons themselves.
I work at a community college in western North Carolina, building for faculty and students who deserve better than the path of least resistance. Off the clock: barbecue taken seriously, and a free jazz-language OER called Jazz Interactive that I've been building for years because nobody else was going to.