Biography

* Born in NYC in 1939, I did well in good schools — Buckley (1948-53), Deerfield Academy (1953-57), Princeton (1957-61), Columbia (MA 1963, PhD 1968) — with an interest in cultural history in relation to educational theory and practice.

* I had a long professorial career: Johns Hopkins (1965-67), Teachers College, Columbia (assist 1967-71, assoc 1971-81, full 1981-2001, chair 2001-11, and emeritus 2011-on). Two key concerns on which I professed: Educators should pay close attention to the work of major past thinkers (e.g. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Dante, Erasmus, Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber); Media and communications as agents of change in education and culture.

* I have been creative and successful in generating externally funded research and development projects to advance the use of digital technologies in academic situations, K-12 and post-secondary, primarily as the founding director of the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College (1982-2002) and as a senior research scholar in the Office of the Vice-Provost of Columbia University (1994-2001), and secondarily with other groups such as the New Laboratory for Teaching and Learning at the Dalton School and at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Those projects shared a common purpose: improving persons' educational experience by interacting in small groups with cultural assets through networked multimedia.

* I have had sustained roles in academic governance, particularly with respect to technology and education, as Chair of the Department of Communication, Computing, and Technology in Education at TC (1982-2002), as head of the Coordinating Committee on the PhD in Education at Columbia (1996-2011), and as one of the organizers and a member of its Board of Directors for the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning.

* Over the span of my career, I have expressed my ideas and concerns in diverse texts. In them, I have dealt with many topics, drawing on an extensive intellectual background. As a writer, I aspire to be clear and engaging while respecting the complexity and difficulty of the matters I address. I think we live in a culture in which we vastly overproduce cultural materials and consume them with a serious deficiency of attention. I feel a responsibility to resist those conditions by writing for readers who will pay close attention to texts they believe will have importance over an extended period.