An Introduction To Someone Named Whitney Ransom McGowan and A Little on Social Media
Hi Everyone,
For those of you reading this blog, I am taking a class on social media by David Wiley. I am going to be posting my assignments for this class on this blog for a while. Our first assignment is to tell a little bit about ourselves and then explain why we are taking the class. So, here goes…
I am from the beautiful town of Preston, Idaho, otherwise known as the place where Napoleon Dynamite was filmed. Yes, Jared Hess went to my high school, and is a great guy. This semester I am starting the PhD program in Instructional Psychology & Technology at BYU. I also received my master’s from BYU. I just finished my thesis last semester, which was on Contributing Factors to Improved Teaching at BYU. I love teaching and learning and really did enjoy researching that topic.
On a lighter note, I do love being outdoors. I love running. (I have run a few half marathons and have run several 22 mile runs.) I just got married a few weeks ago to Jason McGowan. I love this man, and we are so excited to start our lives together. We met at work, FamilyLink.com. We actually have a blog about our wedding, courtship, etc., which is http://mcgowanwedding.com. I also love music and have played the piano since I was eight, started dancing when I was 3, and also play the organ and guitar.
I love sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ with others. I served a full-time mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to Bucharest, Romania. It was such a wonderfully sweet and amazing experience. I love the Romanian people so much. Not one day goes by, since I have been home from my mission (about four years) that I don’t think about the Romanians, or an experience I had in Romania, or something I learned there. I will indeed never get over Romania, and I am quite okay with that. Oh, and I also have the opportunity to interpret for General Conference in Romanian. This is a very neat, rewarding, spiritual….and somewhat scary experience.
I am excited about David Wiley’s class. David used to teach at Utah State University. I have been interested in the subjects I have heard him lecture on and actually applied for Utah State’s PhD program so I could get to know him better and perhaps work on a similar area of research in the future. With that being said, David accepted a position at BYU, and I was delighted by this. I love technology, Web 2.0 gidgets and gadgets, new ideas and communication, and thought this class would be a great experience to learn more about some of these tools and how they can be used in education. I have also been impressed several times by Elder Ballard’s talk urging members of the LDS church to use these new media tools to spread the gospel. I have thought about doing a dissertation topic relating to Elder Ballard’s talk and thought that this class might give me some ideas. I was also very happy when on the first day of class David said that this talk would be the foundation of our course! Sweet!
September 15th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Because of your excitement about David Wiley’s class and because I attended that seminar with you last year that David presented, I decided to also take this class.
I am happy that I saw you being lifted up by those wonderful gentlemen in the above photo. Your wedding was a beautiful day. You are married to a great guy who REALLY loves social media.