About Us
| R. Dale McIntosh, Ph.D. | Bonnie Smith, B.A., M.Ed. | Katherine Berry, B.A., M.A. |
| Rosemary Dolman, B.A. | Mike Walton | Mary Anne Conforti |
| Laurie Thiessen | Mike Shore | Janice Wood |
R. Dale McIntosh, Ph.D.
Dr. McIntosh has a diploma and 5 degrees in the Arts, Education, and Technology. He spent 12 years teaching high school before taking a one-year sessional appointment at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He was then Director of Performing Arts for the Province of Alberta for 2 years before assuming a full-time faculty position at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia.
In the last decade of Dr. McIntosh’s 23 years as a Professor of Education at the University of Victoria, he began to realize that the nature of learning was soon going to take a dramatic shift from the classroom to the Internet. He predicted that more and more students would abandon traditional learning methods in favour of “learning anything from anywhere.” That shift is now well into its third phase with more than 3,000 colleges and universities offering online courses with more than 19 million students studying worldwide online.
After authoring one online course for UVic and a number for Royal Roads University, the administration at the British Columbia Institute of Technology sought his help in creating some of the first BCIT online courses. In the winter of 1998 the first course in the Weaving the Web series was born, with 6 students enrolled in the first online offering from the School of Business. The program has now grown to 16 courses with a combined enrollment of more than 300 students per term with learners engaged in Internet study from as far away from British Columbia, as China, Japan, Holland, Italy, and all across the United States and Canada.
In an effort to promote his ideas about distributed learning, Dr. McIntosh left the University of Victoria to form his own company, deltaMAC Interactive, Ltd., which is devoted to the development of Internet courses. Over the past 10 years he has developed more than 60 online courses for educational institutions in British Columbia. His clients have included the British Columbia Institute of Technology, the University of Victoria, Royal Roads University, University College of the Fraser Valley, and the South Island Distance Education School (SIDES). The latter is a government-funded school that delivers distance education courses to elementary and secondary students in BC.
To all students, Dr. McIntosh is known simply as "Dale," and he welcomes you to the Weaving the Web series of courses.
Bonita M. Smith, B.A., M.Ed.
Bonnie has degrees in the arts and education from the University of Montana and the University of Victoria. In addition to teaching in public schools in Nanaimo, Halifax, and Victoria, she has lectured at the University of Victoria, University of Hawaii, University of Montana, and McGill University. In 1999 she received the Professional Music Educator Award for the Province of BC and in 2004 she received the Most Outstanding Alumnus award from the University of Victoria.
In addition to teaching multimedia courses for the University of Victoria, Bonnie has taught Distributed Learning courses for South Island Distance Education School (SIDES), and authored online courses for SIDES which she beta tested in Victoria schools.
For the past 10 years, Bonnie has included computer and Internet components in all courses that she teaches. She has several active clients, which keep her HTML skills well honed, and has been known to give websites to her friends as a birthday present. Her teaching/learning resource Music: Cross-Cultural Explorations has just been released on CD-ROM.
Katherine Berry, B.A., M.A.
Katherine Berry is currently co-founder of allocadia.com, a planning and budgeting software-as-a-service solution for marketers. Katherine’s professional experience includes roles as Technical Marketing Developer at Elastic Path Software, Web Specialist/Owner at Resonance Marketing, and Web Designer/Front-end Coder at Kelkoo, a Yahoo! Division (one of Europe's largest e-commerce websites after Amazon and eBay).
She holds a Masters in Media Studies from the University of Oslo, Norway, specializing in New Media, a Bachelor of Communication from Simon Fraser University, and an Associate Certificate in Web Technologies from the BC Institute of Technology.
In her free time, she doesn’t really get away from technology and can be found helping friends and family with their small business Web needs.
Rosemary Dolman, B.A.
Rosemary owns allegRo Design, a Website Design company based in Prince George, BC.
Originally from Toronto she has been living in Prince George since 1991. In 2001 she left her position at the College of New Caledonia to pursue a more creative and challenging career in Website Design. She completed the Associate Certificate in Web Technologies at BCIT and has been operating allegRo Design since 2003.
Mike Walton
Mike started working with Flash in 1999, and quickly fell in love with the program. An art nerd at heart, it was the perfect marriage of animation and programming that kept him motivated to keep pushing his skills with each new project.
His company, Mobius Designs, has expanded from a Website design company to a full multimedia developer. Demo and sales animations, cartoon shorts, and Flash video games are all par for the course. He has also had the opportunity to work with some amazing artists over the years, including Eisner Award winning illustrator Tony Millionaire, Star Wars concept artist Ron Cobb, and Blade Runner concept artist Syd Mead.
You can check out more of Mike's work at www.mobiusdesigns.com, or right here, as Mike designed the latest version of the Weaving the Web site.
Mary Anne Conforti
Mary Anne Conforti is a freelance programmer who has worked on various Java-based Web applications, both in developing Web pages and handling server-side database requests. She is familiar with other programming languages such as C/C++ and Visual Basic and has worked extensively with XML-based technology, including the XQuery query language, XPath, and XSLT. Mary Anne is also familiar with many Java-based Web frameworks, such as Struts, Java Server Faces, and the Google Web Toolkit.
Mary Anne’s studies began at Simon Fraser University where she majored in linguistics. She expanded her studies to include Italian linguistics and art history and studied at the Universita di Siena in Italy. Her interests soon involved the Internet and computer sciences and she attended BCIT where she completed the Computer Systems Technology program.
Mary Anne is currently involved in designing and implementing an online reviewing system using the JavaServer Faces and ICEfaces frameworks.
Laurie Thiessen
Laurie was introduced to Web design in 1996 and has been designing sites ever since. Her education is in graphic design and she has diplomas in Fine Arts and Digital Art and Design. Laurie has also taken numerous continuing education courses over the years ranging from Photography to XML.
Laurie has worked as a freelance Web designer, a Web designer for a large communications company and currently works for Thompson Rivers University.
Laurie teaches several courses in the program and is thrilled to have the opportunity to teach the techniques she uses all day long. Her work at Douglas College, Kwantlen University College, and now TRU has presented her with the challenge of creating sites for a varied audience including high school students, adult learners and visually impaired students who access sites with screen readers.
When Laurie isn't sitting in front of her computer, she is likely in the interior camping, fishing or practicing her photography.
Mike Shore
Mike began his computer career in 1980, when he discovered a lab full of Commodore PET computers as part of his high school’s Computer Club. He spent the next 20 years providing programming and network support to such diverse fields as real estate, direct marketing, fish processing, snack foods, commercial printing and news dissemination. In early 1999 Mike settled down and is now working in the Computer Resources department at BCIT, pounding out PHP code and “keeping everything running.”
Mike has the Certificate in Web Technologies from BCIT. He enjoys the technical side of the web, specifically databases and programming. Mike runs his own programming and consulting company at http://www.mikeshore.com.
During his free time Mike enjoys all kinds of sports — ice hockey, floor hockey and roller hockey — as well as hiking the mountains of North Vancouver with his dog Aspen.
Mike no longer teaches in this program but still maintains and administers the student WebApps server at BCIT, which is widely used in all of our courses.
Janice Wood
Janice has the Associate Certificate in Web Technologies and is currently completing the Advanced Certificate. Janice lives in New Westminster, works full-time and keeps her Web skills honed by maintaining several client websites. In her spare time she enjoys digital photography and watercolour painting.