Welcome to Jason Frand's Homepage

September 1, 2006 was the start of an entirely new career for me. Retiring in 2006 meant it was thirty years since completing my doctorate (1976) and having lived an incredible career at UCLA involving the future:  thinking about it, teaching about it, designing (and building) a building for it.  That career was my trip to the moon!  Now I'm on a trip to Mars! Retiring I turned my time and energy toward doing something I really enjoy doing: teaching young children mathematics! As a bonus, I was invited to write a book about how to teach math problem solving.

My (on-going) life as a husband, father, grandfather and community member

• Travels with Lois and Jason catalogs many of the wonderful travel adventures we've shared together since our 1966 honeymoon camping trip across the US. 
• The poem The Owl's Answer in many ways summarizes my views toward life, and learning as the greatest journey which we can experience.
• Year One 1974 Experiences describes the chaos in my life as a doctoral student, but still rings true after all these years.
• The 2013 Culver City Education Foundation President's Award for Community Service (see fourth picture down) was very nice recognition of the years of volunteer support that Lois and I contributed to Culver City schools.
• In May each year since 2010 I've served as a judge at the California State Science Fair.
  

My (retired) life as a Math coach

My (former) professional life at UCLA Anderson School

• My role as Assistant Dean and Director, Anderson Information Systems 1980 - 2006 is nicely summarized in the School's retirement article.
• The article The Information-Age Mindset:  Changes in Students and Implications for Higher Education, the cover story in fall 2000 EDUCAUSE Review, captured the behavioral changes in our university students that I had observed.  I think this was the most important article I had written.
  
• My most challenging research was thinking about how we would manage all the information flooding us in this information age.  Traditionally librarian cataloged and organized files and documents for us.  However, with everyone using a computer, personal knowledge management is a serious challenge.  It was nice learning in 2017 that my 1998 paper Personal Knowledge Managment:  Who? What? Why? Where? When? How? is cited on Wikipedia in the History and Background as the originator of the term!   
  
• My primary research area was tracking the introduction and impact of computer technology in the university environment, as reflected in Annual UCLA Survey of Business School Computing Usage conducted between 1980 and 1999. This research was the motivation for so many invitations to speak at conferences and schools around the world. 
  
• As an instructor, my courses where almost always future oriented:  I taught an "office automation" course in the early 1980s, which reflected the early introduction of word processing on computers.  Also in the early 80's I taught an introduction to computer technology course in which the students developed the specifications for the first microcomputer for the Anderson faculty.  The 1999 description for my Managerial Computing course (using what was then "emerging" technology)  with its focus on the future, has a fun set of starting questions, many of which are now answered.
• An assignment in my 1996 Managerial Implications of Emerging Information Technologies class was to select an emerging technology and write a paper describing it and the issues.  I selected the best papers and posted them on my website thinking that our students had good ideas worth sharing.  Bill Palace’s paper on Data Mining has been a major success from the perspective that it is still available and listed on the first page of a Google or a Yahoo search. 
  
• Toward the end of my UCLA career, I conducted several workshops on the Library of the Future, building on the work we did on integrating the UCLA Anderson School library and computer organizations. 
  
• The decade of the 1990s focused on planning and then implementing AndersoNet, at the time, the most advanced computing and network environment in any university.  These fun Network Central Photos show all the spaghetti wiring which the user never saw, but made it all possible.  But, this was just another step in the history of computing at UCLA.  Clay Sprowls introduced digital technology to the campus in the 1950s and documented this fascinating centralized computer history with pictures and testimonials.  My mini- and micro-computer history adds another dimension to the story.  Note:  I downloaded Clay's files from the www.personal.anderson.ucla.edu web server in June, 2017 in an effort to preserve this history as the server is being retired.  Hopefully all pictures and links were captured.