Alan Ng
Biography
Alan Ng is the educational technologist for the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Division of Continuing Studies, as well as its German for reading knowledge instructor and — of all things — its Irish fiddle instructor. He is mainly responsible for instructional design and administration of the Division’s online, noncredit courses. His PhD was in German literature at UW–Madison, although he finds his undergraduate physics degree from University of California, Berkeley, just as valuable. Alan’s technology background extends back to childhood in the mid-1970s, when he began by writing a Fortran program on punchcards for a room-sized mainframe, and he has mucked around in the guts of many generations of computer hardware and software since then. His game-design involvement began even earlier, game-testing for his engineer father at Atari and its predecessors. These days, Alan’s primary research project is building the Irish Traditional Music Tune Index.