Bio for Michael Bush

My first career consisted of my 20 years of service as an officer in the United States Air Force. My first job title was missile launch officer, and our duties in the Minuteman Modernized ICBM program was to make sure the missiles were ready to launch and then to be ready to launch them should the launch message arrive. After doing that for just under four years, I then spent the rest of my 20-year Air Force career teaching French and doing research and development at the US Air Force Academy.

Upon retirement from the Air Force as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1992, I accepted a position at Brigham Young University (BYU) as Associate Professor of French and Instructional Psychology & Technology.  After 11 years in the Department of French and Italian, I was named Associate Director of the Center for Language Studies at BYU where I conducted research and led development efforts on new technologies. There I worked with a broad range of very bright students in the lab I directed, where we developed architectures for delivering and studying online learning as well as produced video and award-winning, online, multimedia applications. Central to my work has been support for e-learning standards for such as SCORM (Shareable Content Reference Model ), the Experience API from the Advanced Distributing Learning Initiative, and LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) from the IMS Global Learning Consortium,

Click here to see a complete vita.

Hobbies

Serving as a doting grandfather to our 21 grandkids, I also have enjoyed skiing. After a 15 year hiatus in that interest I began skiing again in 2013. My wife and I also enjoy movies which we experience in the home theater, which I built over a nine-month period in 2005. That was supposed to be an over-the-holidays effort that quickly became more extensive than I had initially planned. The fun part is that I did it ALL myself, except for laying the carpet. The center woofer is from a speaker I put together when I was 12 and the left and right woofers are from the stereo I had when I was in college. My oldest son, Christophe, made fun of me during construction, telling me that I was putting so much effort into the project that I could afford to put in some new speakers. I responded by asking where would be the fun in that. I combined new frequency crossover circuitry, new but inexpensive tweeters with salvaged mid-range speakers from BYU to come up with the end result. When he heard the system the first time, Christophe seemed to be impressed with how things turned out.

Religion

My religious faith has been important to me ever since I joined the Southern Baptist Church at age ten. I spent a couple of happy years attending that church and learning about how to be a better person. in 1958, when I was 12, my mother, sister, and I joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while living in Montgomery, Alabama. I later served as a missionary in France for two and a half years. Like most members of our church I have served in numerous positions:

• Several stints as a Sunday school teacher
• President of the Sunday School in a couple of wards
• Activities Committee chair and ward financial clerk in Missouri,
• President of the Young Men’s organization and Roadshow Director in the Academy Ward in Colorado Springs, Colorado
• Elder’s Quorum president in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, when I was in graduate school at The Ohio State University
• Executive Secretary in our ward in Versailles, France,
• Bishop’s counselor in the Ninth Ward in Colorado Springs, Colorado,
• High Councilor and later Bishop in a BYU Student Ward
• Ward Clerk in Orem, Utah
• High Councilor in the Provo Young Single Adult 11th Stake
• High Priests Group Leader in Orem

Politics

Alabama-born to a long line of Democrats, I spent the first few years of adulthood not really knowing much about my political beliefs. I remember very well hearing Ronald Reagan on the radio after his defeat by Gerald Ford at the 1976 Republican Convention and being very impressed by what he had to say. After hearing me praise Ronald Reagan in the early 1980’s, my dear mother exclaimed, “You’re nothing but a damn Republican!” The more I thought about it, the more I figured she was right. That comment, preceded and followed by her fond recollections of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, caused me to decide that political issues were not to be a staple of our conversations. I should add that she was news editor at the Alabama Journal when she retired a few years later, which most perhaps sheds some light on my decision regarding our conversation topics.

See @Bush46 on Twitter for my political tweeting.