Professional Activities & Projects

Vita

The long version of my professional life is here. The more narrative but less complete version lies below:

Teaching

My main professional focus is on the design, implementation and evaluation of computer-based learning environments. The courses I teach are all variations on that theme: ED 834 is a doctoral class about the design of learning systems; EDTEC 570 focuses on the development of WebQuests and lessons wrapped around telecollaboration, databases and software; and EDTEC 670 is all about the design of educational games and simulations. I just ended a long stint of coordinating the nine sections of EDTEC 470 class taken by pre-service teachers. EDTEC 700 is an umbrella course that enables us to offer short immersions into current tools and concepts. Within that framework, I've developed courses about wikis, blogs, Second Life, podcasting and CMS. I've also guided curriculum development for the Triton and Patterns Projects, Challenge Grants of the San Diego Unified School District that are now complete.

Software

I've developed two educational packages for children (Quations published by Scholastic and Grab-a-Cab by Silver Burdett and Ginn) but boundless wealth continues to elude me. In 1994 my PLANalyst lesson planning tool was published by SuperSchool Software, and I'm working on a new version for a new publisher. HomeMaker is a free tool I wrote to help ordinary mortals create personal home pages without dealing with html. Instructional simulations and games are my particular focus because I've always been interested in figuring out what makes things interesting.

K-12

I'm also very involved with schools and teachers. I was the founding president of San Diego Computer-Using Educators in 1982 and later served on the Board of Directors of CUE, Inc.

For 6 years, I co-directed (with Dr. Nancy Farnan and Rochelle Treger of the School of Teacher Education) the T2ARP program which prepares student teachers to work within the technology-rich restructured environments of O'Farrell Community School and Morse High School. The T2ARP program was a finalist in the 1998 Association of Teacher Educators national competition for outstanding teacher education programs.

In January 2000, clearly due to some kind of clerical error, I was named to the eSchoolNews Total Impact 30 list.

A similar misunderstanding led to my being profiled in the August 2000 Converge Magazine as a shaper of ed tech's future.

From 2002 to 2005 I served on the National Educational Advisory Board for Cable in the Classroom. I'm presently on the EMINTS Center Advisory Board.

For seven summers I did workshops at the Thacher School in Ojai, California, an area so beautiful that Lost Horizon was filmed there. Thacher is a private boarding school with fiber to the dorms and a commitment to use technology well. If only public schools could be so well supported!

Products

Some presentations, pages, papers, and workshops:

Mediated Me

Where's Bernie?

I get around. Maybe we'll meet at a conference some time.

Click on the map below to see where I'm going to be later this year.