Jebeze Alexander, one of CCT's web developers, has been an important member of CCT's team in coding and maintaining the American Memory Fellows Programs website. In addition to web programming, Jebeze also works with students, teachers, administrators, and adult learners to help them build technology and web skills as well as actual websites.
Randy Bass is assistant professor of English and American Studies at Georgetown University. As Director of the American Studies Crossroads Project, Randy's work is at the forefront of both theory and practice in using new media to further humanities scholarship and teaching. The American Studies Crossroads Project is furthering professional exchange among teachers of American Studies in the United States, and internationally. He served as a key advisor and reviewer of collections in Phase I of CCT's work with the Library. He will serve as a facilitator and presenter in the online orientation and during the Institute, where he will speak about the fit between humanities scholarship, new technologies, and new teaching approaches.
Bret Eynon is founder and director of the American Social History Project's Education Programs, which help schools, colleges and community education organizations enrich history education by integrating the study of primary documents and images, building historical thinking skills, and empowering students to link history to their own lives. As director of the NEH-funded New Media Classroom, a pioneering effort to build high school-college teacher collaborations around the use of new media in history classrooms, he has conducted numerous workshops to help teachers strengthen their curricula, rethink their practice, and utilize new teaching resources. A consultant on each phase of CCT's work with the Library, Bret will be a key facilitator during the week-long Institute in Washington.
After completing my American Memory Fellow project, I have gone on to conduct workshops in my school district and at state and local conferences on using the American Memory Collections. I also had the opportunity to work with the 1998 Fellows as an online facilitator during orientation before their Institute and after it working with five teams online as they field tested, revised, and prepared to post their lessons. My students would want you to know that they spend a lot of time using the collections as we do several online projects each year.
I look forward to meeting and working with the Class of 1999 Fellows!
Since 1987 Frances has been the librarian at University Laboratory High School, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's secondary-level laboratory school for high ability students. For the past several years she has been interested in how technology (and the Internet specifically) affects student search strategies and perceptions of information sources. As a member of the computer literacy faculty team, which teaches two required courses, she developed a curriculum that emphasizes the evaluation of information across formats and addresses ethical uses of information and communication technology. She edited an issue of Library Trends on "Children and the Digital Library" (Volume 45, Number 4, Spring 1997) and co-authored an article entitled "Teaching Virtue in a Virtual World: Internet Ethics for Students," which will appear in the March 1998 issue of School Library Journal. Last summer Frances was an American Memory Fellow, which has resulted in an interesting year of working with kids and the collections.
Lois Kohn-Claar is a former high school social studies teacher with several years' experience coordinating online curriculum development and teacher training. At the EDC Center for Children and Technology, Ms. Kohn-Claar is a Senior Research Associate where her responsibilities include curriculum design both online and offline, and web development. Prior to her work with the American Memory Fellows project, she helped to create and facilitate a web site for the National Kids Biodiversity Project, a project with the American Museum of Natural History. She also evaluated lesson plans for the IBM/PBS CyberSchool Winter Olympic web site. Before coming to CCT, at Thirteen/WNET in New York, Ms. Kohn-Claar was the manager of Learning Link, one of the first educational online networks supporting K-12 classrooms in the use of media and technology to improve student learning. Also at Thirteen/WNET she developed technology training workshops for teachers and administrators from Kindergarten through college. Ms. Kohn-Claar holds both a BA and MS Ed from the University of Pennsylvania. She will help to facilitate all aspects of the orientation and summer institute.
Mark Sample, a former high school social studies teacher, is working on his Ph.D. in the interdisciplinary Comparative Literature and Literary Theory Program at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests combine literary studies with elements of visual anthropology and sociology, placing a strong emphasis on pop culture and new media. For several years Mark has been involved with the American Studies Crossroads Project, coordinating several research projects around issues of technology and pedagogy. This is his third American Memory Fellows Institute.
Sonnet Takahisa is the Co-Director of the New York City Museum School, a pioneering alternative middle school that engages students in artifact-based learning experiences in collaboration with key New York City museums including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the New York Historical Society. Before founding the Museum School, Sonnet was in the Education Division of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where she oversaw programs for students, teachers, artists and visitors. She has been an arts education consultant to numerous museums, art centers, historical societies and foundations. She has also given workshops and presentations at professional meetings of the American Association of Museums, the National Art Education Association, the New York State Art Teachers Association, and other groups.
For the past two years I've been lucky enough to be Project Director for the American Memory Fellows Program at CCT, working with some great educators across the country, as well as the amazing staff at the National Digital Library. Officially my title is Senior Research Associate at the Center for Children and Technology, the New York office of a not-for-profit education and human development firm called the Education Development Center. At CCT we focus on understanding the roles that new technologies can play in improving teaching and learning across the disciplines. My responsibilities include research and curriculum design, teacher professional development, and project management.
What has really excited me about working with American Memory is the interpretive aspect. I'm amazed at how interpreting a primary document can unleash students' creative and analytic thinking, can get them excited about trying to understand the foreign country we call the past, and can get them debating its meaning in the present. This is especially important to me since, as a sociologist and teacher, I worry about the consequences of a society in which so many people do not feel any connection to a rich, usable past. Finally I think American Memory provides a wonderful vantage point from which to re- interpret educational technologies and our goals for them, since it puts rich content at the center, and invites us to think carefully about what we want students to do differently, and more of, in learning the humanities.
For the AMF Program, I oversee all aspects of CCT's work, including curriculum design and development of the Orientation and Institute, design and programming of the online environment, and coordination of facilitators and historians. Over the last 14 years at CCT I've worked on lots of educational media projects, got an MA in Liberal Studies (focusing on American cultural history), worked on my doctorate in sociology, and taught college courses in the history of media. The American Memory Fellows Program is the first project -- and perhaps will be the only, ever -- to combine all of my interests. Besides being fun, it's been very convenient.