Richard has been teaching full-time for twenty years. He teaches college-level Network Engineering and is creating an “IoT Explorations” course for the coming school year.Richard also taught Secondary Technology Education concurrently for eleven years. In these venues, the topics included coding, operating systems, electronics, multimedia, and networking.

Before his full-time teaching career, Richard was a Cisco Systems Network Academy Area Manager, Apple Computer Systems Engineer, Texas Instruments Technical Instructor, and an IBM Mainframe Systems Field Engineer.

At Apple Computer, he designed and implemented the technology infrastructure for the Apple Market Center, a predecessor to today’s Apple Stores, and co-authored the “Apple ][ Primer”, Apple’s first classroom teacher training manual.Richard holds AAS, BS, and MS degrees in Electronics Technology, Radio and Television Journalism, and Education from Southern Illinois University and Texas A&M University.In my conversation with Richard, we touched on a wide array of topics, drawing mostly from his vast experience.

He worked at Apple Computer for 20 years, at a time when networks were open and unencrypted, and witnessed firsthand Apple’s foray into education. He also wrote the Apple ][ Primer, one of the first programming guides for teachers. This discussion reminded me of my first computer, an Apple //e with 128KBytes of RAM.Richard was one of the first users of Visicalc, one of the first visual spreadsheet programs for Apple ][ and defined much of how modern spreadsheets work.

This knowledge was beneficial when he worked at Texas Instruments and revolutionized job costing.We discussed Richard’s work at the CISCO Academy, where he teaches Network Engineering, and the course he is developing on IoT Fundamentals.

In this course, Richard is designing, and he combines a Raspberry Pi and Arduino to teach IoT concepts by gradually building an IoT application.

We also examined Richard’s adaptation of the Raspberry Pi Full Stack application, which is one of my favorite moments of the conversation.We talked about Radio Shack, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Mr. Wizard, breadboarding, and so much more.I am sure you will enjoy this conversation.