(I mean, like, what could you possibly want to know?)
Education:
B.A., Linguistics, The Ohio State University (March 1984)
M.A., Linguistics, The Ohio State University (March 1986)
(And I should probably mention that Ph.D. work in Applied Linguistics at University of Tsukuba, ABD...but since I currently have no intention of finishing the dissertation....)
(Go ahead and insinuate any of those are a diploma mill, you bastard.)
OK, what else?
I'm a native of southern Ohio and grew up in a small village on the banks of the Ohio River. My mother's family has lived in the area for several generations; my father was from across The River in Kentucky, but the Craigs seem to have done a bit of wandering (as far north as Piketon, Ohio, at one point during my grandfather's childhood) after arriving in the Ohio Valley from somewhere in Virginia (probably best not to speculate on the reasons behind ancestral mobility!).
After high school I entered The Ohio State University, originally intending to earn a degree in Computer Science in the College of Engineering. I graduated four and a half years later (Winter Quarter) with a bachelors in Linguistics from the College of Arts and Sciences (There's a story there—several, in fact—but it's a bit involved, so let's save it for another time, what?) and immediately entered the Masters Program in Linguistics. Two years later I had my masters in hand but found myself working on a second masters in Japanese Linguistics in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (at the time right next door to LingoLand on the second floor of Cunz Hall; there's a story there, too, this one involving a mysterious woman of the Orient ... but never mind!).
I came to Japan on October 6, 1987, so I've been here for nearly 18 years now. (I was supposed to stay for only one and a half years but didn't have the sense to leave when that time was up!) This is my fifth year at Ibaraki University.
I spent most of the first half of my time in Japan in Tsukuba, enrolled as a graduate student in the doctorate course (Applied Linguistics) in the Institute of Literature and Linguistics of University of Tsukuba. (My area of interest was "Komputaa Gengogaku", Computation Linguistics, not pedagogy per se.)
Before coming to IbaDai, I taught for four years at Fukushima National College of Technology (Fukushima Kousen; a kousen, in case you're wondering, is a high school + junior college with a technical bent. I'd never heard of them before being hired at one, either) located in Iwaki (where I still live). After that I taught part-time for two years at Iwaki Meisei University and East Japan International University, in addition to more classes at the Kousen, but only in the Department of Communication and Information Science. (Wow! I just discovered that the final version of my homepage is still on the Kousen servers!! And Miyazawa-Sensei is still using the same basic page for the English Department that I set up all those years ago. Pity we never could get the rest of the English faculty excited about creating their own pages. Oh well.)
Anyway, that's about all I feel like writing at the moment. I'll accept any (reasonable) questions and put the answers here, if anybody has any!
About that silly photo:
If you haven't been on campus, particularly in the Humanities Building, this won't make any sense to you. Sorry! It's a parody of a poster put out by the department's Employment Guidance Committee. I've pretty much kept the color scheme and just substituted my own picture...with a bit of caption editing, too.
The URL along the side is to my off-campus site, IBADAIRON.NET.
From what I understand, the design was submitted in a contest by a student, which I think is pretty cool. (I had a quite different opinion until learning that, however!) It's a pity the university didn't use a similar approach when creating the new uni logo; then we wouldn't have the copyright restrictions that required Bob and me to change the logo which I created a few months ago for the IEP website from this
to the following.
I went ahead and grayed out the offending portion of the first logo, because the last thing I want is some idiot office tool telling me I have to remove it from this website as well (if you're curious about what it looked like, click here); and some "designer" sending his lawyer after me because I'm infringing his holy copyright would be a major annoyance as well.
Once again I am impressed (in a negative way) by the foresight and intelligence of the administrative office. I can't imagine a company commissioning a corporate logo and then not buying the complete rights to it so that it could do with it as it pleased.
Mysterious are the ways....