October, 2009
I chaired a session of the
Asian Conference on Education 2009, held in Osaka, Japan.
The topic was Technology, Culture, and Society, and I also presented a paper on the influence of Google in contemporary learning: 'Intelligence in a sea of data: Teaching and learning in the Google generation.' (
Paper,
PPT,
Notes)
It was a wonderful opportunity to meet people from dozens of Asian countries, and the reaction to the paper was very positive.
June 2009
Disney and Asus teamed up to bring out the Disney Netpal ... and tapped EasyBits to differentiate the UI and provide parental controls.
I led the team customizing a web browser, email application, parental admin panel, and entire GUI overlay of Windows XP for Disney, marketed as Disney Desktop. (Note that this video is an Engadget interview with a Disney PR rep.)
(
Update: Disney sent me a thank-you gift)
May 2009
Invited as a
speaker to present at eLiberatica 2009, a conference on open source technology in Bucharest, Romania.
I spoke about OSS in education, having used open source tools and frameworks (Moodle, Joomla, Perl, Linux, PHP, MySQL, Postgres, etc.) to build and launch three learning management systems (LMSes) for tens of thousands of North American schools over the past decade.
December 2008
The Intel Classmate PC has a unique user interface customized for schools. I led the team customizing a complete education-friendly GUI for the CMPC.
It features quick one-click access to frequently used applications; a user-customizable tray for immediate access to common gadgets, a safe web browser, safe email, and much more.
Plus, the UI is customizable by schools or districts via a server-based configuration tool, and teachers can customize available applications, privileges, and desktop themes for each class, if they choose.
September 2008
After leading the creation of a new planning system,
onTRAC, for K-12 students, I exec produced a video explaining what it is and how it works.
The video is brief, entertaining,
and educational. We did it on greenscreen and then replaced the background with white for a very clean, simple look that was easy to overlay with animation.
Currently being used in thousands of schools with over 10 million students, it will be shown to over 20 million students by 2010.
August 2008
Campus is an e-learning site with a mixed-source technology infrastructure: open source core, proprietary user-management layer and skin.
This site brings all Premier online resources together, where 25 million users can access courses, product support, and more.
E-learning courses on Campus take advantage of social media such as YouTube and Flickr, and include embedded content from SlideShare and Scribd.
August 2008
Not much I can say about this, except that it was a real pleasure working for and with Joel - he taught me a lot.
Joel just recently moved on to a position with Pearson Education as a VP in their teacher assessment unit.
The recommendation, by the way, is visible on my LinkedIn profile, along with others from colleagues, direct reports, and business associates.
May 2007
One of the physical products among the 35+ I managed. This planner was created in partnership with Franklin Covey, and contains 7 Habits intellectual property from Steven R. Covey.
This page introduces a monthly topic with great simplicity, focus, and emotional impact. I wanted the images and copy to be as tight as a great magazine advertising spread.
To achieve that, I wrote and art directed this page personally to give our writers and designers a very clear sense of my vision for the product.
March 2007
In 2007 our flagship product line was failing. I was given one month to analyze why clients were leaving and design a plan for growth.
My plan was accepted, and I embarked on a $250,000 project to stabilize over $40 million in revenue.
This is a slide from my presentation to company executives outlining the problems - and the solution. Note the tag cloud design aesthetic.
June 2006
Consulted with a suicide prevention agency, Telecare BC, to clarify web opportunities and requirements.
I helped the Telecare board of directors create a web presence that conveyed their brand ... and their core message of care and hope.
January 2006
Just one piece of an integrated marketing campaign involving personalized direct mail, personalized websites, inside sales, and outside sales.
Note the fields for first and last name on the postcard; the website was also customized with name and known preferences.
August 2005
In spite of the questionable design dictated by header and sidebar brand standards, this was one of the simplest calendar-creation sites online in 2005.
Heavily AJAXed, very visual, with instant desktop-like responsiveness, this site let anyone build a fully custom calendar ... after which we automatically routed it to a distributed network of digital printers via a sophisticated allocation algorithm.
No-touch web-to-print is simple for business cards, but not for complex customizable products. We made this application sing.
October 2004
Go is an e-learning site my team built in 2004-2005 with heavy doses of multimedia, manageability, and assessment.
Go is built on a Mambo/Joomla framework in PHP with several thousand lines of custom code for in-depth reporting and surveying tools.
Eventually we added Get Set, another product with extensive e-learning components.
Hundreds of thousands of students across North America have had access to these resources.
October 2003
Attack of the Mold People plays on teen fears of being pressed into any available adult-sized mold to motivate them care enough to invent their own future.
In addition to exec producing, I have a small voice roll in this one (listen for next ... next).
This is one of 30-40 Flash movies I produced for our e-learning projects. They were wildly popular with our demographic: middle and high school teens.
August 2003
Grand Central is a calendaring and scheduling app for schools that includes Cascading Calendars, Homework Hub, and a personal planner.
Educators create calendars and classes, students and parents subscribe, and everyone gets precisely the events and tasks in their calendar that they need.
December 2002
I led the team that built the first 2 iterations of this site, which enables clients to essentially create their own print products from cover to cover with an extremely high degree of customizability.
We once calculated that the degrees of freedom built into this application enabled over 4 billion distinguishable products to be created ... which means that we had to carefully manage complexity in order to ensure usability.
Thousands of clients use this application, saving hundreds of thousands of $$$ in customer service time.
September 2002
This was a catalog site for 500+ products, developed as a stop-gap measure while a division-wide e-commerce solution was being prepared.
It was simple, clean, and featured drop-down menus: fairly new at the time and challenging to ensure cross-platform compatibility, but critical due to the large number of products and breadth of categories.
August 2002
A vastly simplified personal mission statement creation wizard built in support of a new product launch: the Discover Agenda.
Discover ... mission ... get the connection?
Discover Agenda and its various online resources did almost $50 million in high-margin business the first year alone.
August 2002
One of the multimedia projects that I produced in support of online product training and e-learning initiatives.
This particular one is designed for middle schoolers, with a frenetic pace and funky but simple graphics. Unlike most which I simply exec produced, I also wrote this one.
May 2002
My second generation blog, a technology focused rave & rant, news & reviews site.
I rolled my own on LAMP - Wordpress was still b2 - and supported multiple authors, article ranking, author trustrating, and more.
What could be simpler: 2 colors, 1 image, and 3 columns. Orange, of course, for the House of Orange.
October 2001
Screencasting may have started in 1994, but it was popularized in 2004 by Jon Udell and his heavy metal umlaut.
Happily ignorant of the approaching jargon, I was screencasting in 2001 to support client training on web applications. (Thanks to my friends at Ambrosia Software, who make Snapz Pro!)
September 2000
Planned and conducted multiple training sessions for 200+ sales consultants.
The highlight of the conference was a ticketed 2-hour presentation (Premier High) which included drama, music, a laser light show, and the centerpiece: new product unveiling.
I enjoy presenting and facilitating, and this was one of the many opportunities I have had to use those skills in training sales personnel.
May 2000
Discover Zone was an edutainment e-learning community.
Ahead of its time, the Zone had points for activities (think Neopets, Webkinz), forums, instant messaging (think Facebook), blogs, multimedia learning activities, collaboration tools, and much more. It was built on open-source software: Linux, Perl, & Mason.
At its peak, the Zone had over 500,000 registered users.
July 1999
Two pieces of an integrated marketing campaign involving online/offline collateral and inside/outside sales in higher education.
Simple, targeted, elegant ... it is not always the case that something you did years ago withstands the test of your evolving aesthetic sensibility.
February 1998
One of many newsletters I produced for 30,000+ schools across North America while leading marketing projects.
I researched articles, interviewed subjects, wrote copy, and art-directed the layout, as the product and marketing team was very small.
Note the early nod to free-as-in-beer IP in the sub-head.
March 1997
Sometimes when executives are on airplanes they are asked what they do. And sometimes they need some help to compose an answer with sufficient gravitas.
That was the genesis of this piece, which, in spite of its odd origins, served well to quickly communicate what we could do for prospective clients.
June 1996
My first professional position was Staff Writer. I wrote and produced all content for a series of educational products. Here's a sample from one of them.
In 1996, 10 million students used our products, driving $50 million in annual business. By 2000, the number had grown to over 20 million.
My position as Staff Writer was not tremendously high level, but it was creatively rewarding and numerically gratifying: millions read my work daily.
(Note the Star Trek reference in the title.)
