Hello, all of you whoever you may be,
My name is William Illingworth, and I mostly go by Will. Typically, I introduce myself as William in type font because of all of the i’s and l’s in my full name – it can start to blend together depending on the font. However, I do not mind being called Will or William just not Bill.
I work at a private religious higher ed institution that services undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs in several states and in Uganda. My job titles are Digital Learning Systems Administrator and Instructional Technologist. Frankly, when I talk with someone outside of Education, I tell them that I teach teachers how to teach with tech. And, in most cases, that proves to be true. While I run our learning management system, our lecture capture system, and our course evaluation system, I spend a majority of my time working with faculty members to improve their physical and virtual classroom experiences. As an institution, we provide face-to-face, blended, and fully online educational experiences, and so I work with faculty across all of those media. Even this morning, I helped an adjunct faculty member prepare his traditional undergraduate course material in our LMS, and then went immediately to a meeting with a department chair to work on a pilot program that will track his department’s learning objectives. This samples a day in the life of Will.
For the sake of the internet, I have been using it since I was seven years old. I grew up on dial-up, waiting for Encyclopedia Britannica, and thinking that Microsoft’s Pinball game was the best thing since sliced bread (or Betty White, but I wouldn’t come to understand that joke until much later). Nonetheless, by 13 I had started working with some friends on a fandom website, experiencing Dreamweaver and .php for the first (and last) time. After the 4th grade, I participated in cyber charter schools for the remainder of my K-12 education. So, in that capacity, the internet and technology have been integral to my daily life since my youth. I use it in my work life, and I use it just as much once I get home. While I try to avoid tech fads, I’m always excited by new tech and try to see what ways I can optimize my life through the internet’s many tools.
For spare time, well, I wonder “what is that?” I’m fairly non-stop with education, professional development, and family. Ever busy and always moving, my major hobby for what spare time I do get is spent practicing my martial art Taekwon-Do. I’ve been training for 18 years, and I love every component of it.
If I could live off of Taekwon-Do, I would. However, I do not believe I could healthily run a school as a business, so I prefer to teach under my master instructor and participate in my community as a servant so that I can pour my heart into the practice without compromising my beliefs.
I just recently tested for my 4th-degree black belt in the International Taekwon-Do Federation and it was a wonderful moment in what was a very tough 2016. The photo below shows the whole gang that was involved, and it was truly a community event. Even though there were only a few of us being tested, everyone in this photo participated in the event to some extent or another.
Otherwise, a critical component of my character is my attention to the details. It is hard for me to do anything at less than the best, and so when I start a project I like to aim for the best, finished product I can. Where this blog is the only exception is that I intend to learn, throughout the course of this semester, what it is to blog in the professional world. I’ve blogged before, but I’ve never found much success with it and I haven’t kept up with it. This semester, I hope that this process will show me what the end looks like so that I can start again.
Til next time,
WVHI