Dee Anna Willis: an appreciation.

SITE was founded to create a professional academic home to foster cross-disciplinary scholarship and collaborative relationships associated with technology and teacher education. Dee Anna and Jerry Willis, the founders of SITE and JTATE, provided an exemplar of a collaborative professional relationship that was itself a microcosm of the larger institution. Jerry is a typical academic entrepreneur, daring to dream great thoughts while simultaneously visionary and impatient with details. Dee Anna grounded the great enterprise that they jointly attempted in reality. She is at the same time warm, welcoming, and practical.

Our first memory of Dee Anna is at the small group of academicians gathered at the first SITE conference. As we were headed toward the luncheon line, she motioned with a friendly beckoning invitation, "Come join us!" As a consequence, what might have become another routine academic conference became an academic home as we joined a group excitedly exploring the potential of technology to transform teaching and teacher education.

Over the years SITE has explored many innovations designed to welcome newcomers and encourage interaction and dialog -- welcoming sessions and briefings at the start of the conference, birds-of-a-feather sessions and special interest groups, and other methods intended to convey the message that everyone with an interest in technology and teacher education is welcome. However, no single method has been as effective as Dee Anna's greetings as SITE's ambassador extraordinaire. We have vivid visual memories of Dee Anna surrounded by visitors in the lobby of the conference hotel moments after her arrival, in a scene akin to a stream of bumblebees traveling to and from a flower as successive groups entering the lobby spot Dee Anna and are warmly greeted, catching up on news and events.

During the early years SITE was begun on a fiscal shoestring, compensated for through "sweat equity" (as Jerry terms it). Often the person who publicly proposes an innovation receives a lion's share of recognition, with correspondingly less public awareness of partners who implement the concept and make it a reality. Few realized that founding SITE was a full-time job for Dee Anna, involving considerable sacrifice in the early years.

This encompassed a range of activities that included planning and preparing for the conference, ensuring that the SITE Technology and Teacher Education Annual was completed and published on time each year, following up and responding to correspondence in a timely fashion, and myriad other tasks. To his credit, Jerry has always taken pains to publicly acknowledge that SITE would not have been possible without Dee Anna's contributions. In truth, it is virtually impossible to unravel their joint contributions, since both were essential.

When it became clear that SITE could no longer be administered by two visionary faculty members and overworked graduate students, a meeting was held to identify a professional administrative arm. During this meeting, at which AACE was selected as an administrative partner in an action that has become a key to SITE's success, one individual arose and spoke for us all, noting, "Dee Anna, I understand why it is necessary to secure a professional full-time administrative staff at this time, but you have done such a great job of organizing the conferences that I wish you could continue to do this every year!" Dee Anna appreciated the compliment, but was visibly relieved when a vote was taken to place the organization on a professional administrative footing.

After years of joint partnership, Dee Anna pursued her own academic vision at a different institution from Jerry. Despite the geographic separation, they continued to collaborate professionally. Dee Anna joined her new academic home at the rank of assistant professor. After she had been there for a period of time, a remarkable event occurred that is a testament to Dee Anna's unique capabilities.

Promotion and tenure is the academic holy grail at most U.S. universities, and ordinarily involves years of preparation. The promotion application is typically a year-long review involving voluminous files prepared by the candidate and reviewed by promotion committees at successive levels of the university--program, department, school or college, provost's office, and board of visitors.

One day Dee Anna opened her mail to find her listed rank increased from assistant professor to associate professor. She called her department chair to report the mistake, and was told, "We all believed that your remarkable contributions to the organization demonstrated that you deserve the higher rank, so we changed it. We hope you don't mind?" This may be the only time that a promotion has occurred in this manner in an American university, and testifies to the widespread recognition of Dee Anna's capabilities as a remarkable individual. Certainly no one in SITE who knew Dee Anna was surprised that she received this well-deserved recognition.

Looking back, it is startling to find that the years have flown by so quickly. Our memories of Dee Anna are a series of vignettes linked to the SITE conferences--sharing ice cream on a warm day in a San Antonio courtyard, watching the koalas at the San Diego Zoo, visiting Disney World in Orlando, and watching flowers bloom after a spring shower in Phoenix.

We look forward to many thoughtful discussions with Dee Anna about technology, teaching, and life, as well as shared ventures beyond the four walls of the conference at future SITE venues that often are as memorable and rewarding in the long term as the academic proceedings themselves. Last year Dee Anna received SITE's Lifetime Achievement Award, and that is certainly appropriate because in a sense, SITE is Dee Anna's lifetime achievement.