After 8 years of employment on the Lake Forest College campus, Academic Technologist Diane Snedden leaves behind a large body of completed projects.

Never one to be anything but fully engaged in one or more endeavors, Diane was tirelessly giving to Lake Forest College through her last semester here. Her work with the Student Symposium in the spring of 2006 will facilitate organization of the event for years to come. The creation of a mangerial database and website, which Diane spear-headed and then oversaw, became a faculty-selected "best" presentation at the Symposium.

Diane writes:

As a member of the symposium committee since 2001, I had opportunity to see the massive manual labor involved in nominations, acceptance, communication with participants, organization of venues and schedules, as well as the presentations of the event via both website and printed program. At the conclusion of Symposium 2005 I suggested we should put all our effort for 2006 into creating an online application and display for the event. This involved creation of both a front and back end for the Symposium website whereby all nominations, abstracts, sponsors, titles and participants would be entered into a database that was searchable and easy to manipulate and change in format and display. With the help of very talented students, and an incredible number of hours devoted to project management, we created our own content management site for the Symposium.

Another Symposium project Diane worked to implement was the History Department's Enchanted Forest image-intensive website, "A Student History of Lake Forest College."

Diane also participated in the development of a number of other projects across the curiculum such as the Labor in the American Economy Econometrics Module for online learning in an ACM (Associated Colleges of the Midwest) information competency project. She additionally facitated the integration of software into courses by data mining and manipulation using Excel spreadsheets for a History class on urban America, as well as through the use of GIS (Geographic Information System) software in the study of Biology and Economics. Working with Religion professor Kathy Benton and LIT systems librarian David Levinson, the online Image Database to Enhance Asian Studies was created and then shared among small liberal arts colleges. Other technology-enhanced projects in the departments of Education and Foreign Languages were brought to fruition by Diane's expertise.

No doubt Diane Snedden leaves behind some shoes that will be tough to fill, although new Academic Technologist Donnie Sendelbach looks forward to completing some equally ambitious projects. Hopefully others are filling the gap Diane left as an active member of the Lake Forest High School PTO. Meanwhile, she is off to new adventures in the foothills of Tucson. We wish her well.