Philip George / Roundup
Pierce College’s Education Technology Committee filled two vacancies Monday when members of the Academic Senate elected Constance Kocs, associate professor of arts and sciences and Joe Perret, adjunct instructor of geology, to terms during their bi-weekly meeting.
With 15 of 22 votes, Kocs was the leading vote-getter in a group of 14 candidates for at-large positions and was thus awarded a two-year term, filling the seat vacated by Debbie Swarens, whose term expires this month.
“I think that they are going to be making some important decisions in the near future and I don’t necessarily want somebody to be making those decisions for me,” she said.
Kocs views these “important decisions” to be ones regarding the campus’ allocation of funding to resources such as technology in the classroom and student and faculty access to such resources.
“I’m interested in technology as it serves us and not as some great, grandiose thing that we must all embrace,” she explained. “My hope is to bring to the committee a certain degree of skepticism along with my enthusiasm for technology in the classroom.”
Perret, garnering eight votes, will complete the final year of Gail Hobbs’ two-year term. Hobbs, a former Pierce geography professor who focused a great deal of her teaching on global positioning systems and geographic information systems, died Feb. 8.
“When you have committees, you have some people that will speak their mind and others who don’t say much,” said Academic Senate President Tom Rosdahl. “Gail was always one who would speak out and say what was on her mind.”
In Hobbs’ stead, Perret brings a tenured record to the table, having been involved in online teaching for eight years and with more than 50 courses.
Prior to transferring to Pierce last year, he served as Chair of the Academic Senate Instructional Technology Committee at Los Angeles Southwest College.
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