speakers

Kevin Crowley
//Director, Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments, University of Pittsburgh// toc Kevin Crowley is an associate professor of Learning Sciences and Policy at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is also Director of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments (UPCLOSE). UPCLOSE works in partnership with museums, community organizations, and media producers to develop innovative learning environments. Crowley’s group conducts basic learning sciences research in informal settings and develops new theories of how people learn about science, technology, engineering, and art.

Crowley currently serves as the editor for the out-of-school learning strand for the Journal of the Learning Sciences, co-directs the NSF-funded Center for the Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE), co-directs the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funded Science Learning Activation Lab, is a W.T. Grant Foundation Distinguished Fellow for Research and Practice at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and runs the website informalscience.org, which is a community site for research and evaluation in informal science. His 15-year research/practice collaboration with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh was awarded the Association of Science and Technology Center’s Roy L. Shafer Leading Edge Award and the Association of Children’s Museum’s MetLife Promising Practice Award.

Crowley has a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University in 1994 and a BA in psychology from Swarthmore College in 1989.

Dale Dougherty
//General Manager, Maker Media Division of O’Reilly Media and Founder, Maker Faire// Dale Dougherty is the editor and publisher of MAKE, and general manager of the Maker Media division of O'Reilly Media, Inc. He also organizes Maker Faire, a newfangled fair that showcases DIY approaches in arts, crafts, science and engineering. Dale has been instrumental in many of O'Reilly's most important efforts, including founding O'Reilly Media, Inc. with Tim O'Reilly. He was the developer and publisher of Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first commercial Web site, which launched in 1993 and was sold to AOL in 1995. Dale was developer and publisher of Web Review, the online magazine for Web designers, and he was O'Reilly's first editor. Prior to developing MAKE, Dale was publisher of the O'Reilly Network and he developed the Hacks series of books. Dale is the author of Sed & Awk. He was a Lecturer in the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) at the University of California at Berkeley from 1996 to 2000.

Margaret Honey
//President and CEO, New York Hall of Science// Margaret Honey joined the New York Hall of Science as president and CEO in November of 2008. She is widely recognized for her work using digital technologies to support children’s learning across the disciplines of science, mathematics, engineering and technology. Prior to joining NYSCI, she served as a vice president of the Education Development Center and director of EDC’s Center for Children and Technology. While at EDC, Dr. Honey was the architect and overseer of numerous large-scale projects funded by organizations including the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Education Sciences, The Carnegie Corporation, The Library of Congress, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Energy. She also co-directed the Northeast and Islands Regional Education Laboratory, a 40 million dollar federally-funded initiative designed to help educators, policy makers and communities improve schools by helping them access and leverage the most current research about learning and K–12 education.

Dr. Honey has helped to shape the best thinking about learning and technology with special attention to traditionally underserved audiences. She has directed numerous research projects including efforts to identify teaching practices and assessments for 21st century skills, new approaches to teaching computational science in high schools, collaborations with PBS, CPB and some of the nation’s largest public television stations, investigations of data-driven decision-making tools and practices; and with colleagues at Bank Street College of Education, she created one of the first internet-based professional development programs in the country. From her early involvement in the award-winning and ground-breaking public television series “The Voyage of the Mimi” to her decade long collaboration on the education reform team for the Union City (New Jersey) school district, Margaret Honey has led some of the country’s most innovative and successful education efforts.

Tom Kalil
//Deputy Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy// Thomas Kalil is currently serving as the Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Senior Advisor for Science, Technology and Innovation for the National Economic Council. Kalil is on leave from UC Berkeley, where he was Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology at UC Berkeley. He was responsible for developing major new multi-disciplinary research and education initiatives at the intersection of information technology, nanotechnology, microsystems, and biology. He also conceived and launched a program called “Big Ideas @ Berkeley,” which provides support for multidisciplinary teams of Berkeley students that are interested in addressing economic and societal challenges such as clean energy, safe drinking water, and poverty alleviation. In 2007 and 2008, Kalil was as the Chair of the Global Health Working Group for the Clinton Global Initiative, where he developed new public and private sector initiatives in areas such as maternal and child health, under-nutrition, and vaccines. Tom was also a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress, where he co-authored A National Innovation Agenda, one of the four pillars of CAP’s Economic Plan for Plan for the Next Administration. He was also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Nanomix, and has served on three committees of the National Academy of Sciences, including the Committee to Facilitate Interdisciplinary Research.

Previously, Thomas Kalil served as the Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Technology and Economic Policy, and the Deputy Director of the White House National Economic Council. He was the NEC's "point person" on a wide range of technology and telecommunications issues, such as the liberalization of Cold War export controls, the allocation of spectrum for new wireless services, and investments in upgrading America's high-tech workforce. He led a number of White House technology initiatives, such as the National Nanotechnology Initiative, the Next Generation Internet, bridging the digital divide, e-learning, increasing funding for long-term information technology research, making IT more accessible to people with disabilities, and addressing the growing imbalance between support for biomedical research and for the physical sciences and engineering. He was also appointed by President Clinton to serve on the G-8 Digital Opportunity Task Force (dot force). Prior to joining the White House, Tom was a trade specialist at the Washington offices of Dewey Ballantine, where he represented the Semiconductor Industry Association on U.S.-Japan trade issues and technology policy. He also served as the principal staffer to Gordon Moore in his capacity as Chair of the SIA Technology Committee.

Tom received a B.A. in political science and international economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and completed graduate work at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is the author of articles and op-eds on S&T policy, the use of prizes as a tool for stimulating innovation, nanotechnology, nuclear strategy, newborn health, vaccines, the impact of mobile communications in developing countries, U.S.-Japan trade negotiations, U.S.-Japan cooperation in science and technology, the National Information Infrastructure, distributed learning, and electronic commerce.

David Kanter
//Director, SciPlay, New York Hall of Science// Dr. David Kanter, director of SciPlay, joined the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) in September of 2010 as the inaugural director of the Sara Lee Schupf Family Center for Play, Science, and Technology Learning (SciPlay). He comes to NYSCI from Temple University where he was faculty in Curriculum, Instruction and Technology in Education and in Biology. His training began with Bachelor of Science degrees in engineering and economics from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by a doctorate in biomedical engineering from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Kanter then took a National Science Foundation fellowship designed to train Ph.D. scientists in science education research, which he pursued with the Learning Sciences group at Northwestern University.

As a faculty member at Northwestern University and then at Temple University, Kanter led several federally funded projects in the context of which he designed middle and high school biology project-based inquiry science curricula, tested these curricula in urban classrooms in Chicago and Philadelphia, and researched design principles for such curricula that promote students’ science learning.

Kanter also designed programs to train practicing and future teachers to help them use projects and inquiry to teach science. These programs included the replication of the UTeach teacher preparation program as part of a national initiative.

Kanter researched teacher learning and how it translates into improvements in students’ achievement, attitudes and career plans. Kanter’s work has most recently been published in the journals Science Education, the Journal of Engineering Education, and New Directions in Teaching and Learning. Kanter’s classroom curricula continue to be used by teachers and students in Chicago and Philadelphia. Kanter’s new National Science Foundation-funded projects include “SciGames: A Technology-enhanced Model for Bridging Informal and Formal Science Learning” and “GeniGames: Investigating the Capacity of Game-based Design Elements to Enhance Affective Dimensions of Genetics Learning.”

Eli Silk
//Research Associate, Center for Highly Interactive Classrooms, Curricula and Computing in Education, University of Michigan// Eli Silk is a Research Associate in the School of Education at the University of Michigan. He is a member of the Center for Highly Interactive Classrooms, Curricula & Computing in Education (hi-ce) where he serves as a project manager for a National Science Foundation grant focused on the development and testing of a learning progression for middle school students' understanding of transformation of matter. His research interests are focused broadly on investigating processes of learning in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. The central aspect of his work has been trying to understand the bidirectional impacts that occur when students attempt to coordinate ideas and practices from the more basic disciplines of Science and Mathematics with related ideas and practices from the more applied disciplines of Technology and Engineering. He has explored these issues primarily with middle school students in contexts such as using engineering design to learn about electricity, and using mathematics to program LEGO robots. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive studies in education from the University of Pittsburgh in 2011.

Tony Wagner
//Innovation Education Fellow, Technology & Entrepreneurship Center, Harvard University// Tony Wagner recently accepted a position as the first Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard. Prior to this, he was the founder and co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for more than a decade. Tony consults widely to schools, districts, and foundations around the country and internationally. His previous work experience includes twelve years as a high school teacher, K-8 principal, university professor in teacher education, and founding executive director of Educators for Social Responsibility. Tony is also a frequent speaker at national and international conferences and a widely published author.

His work includes numerous articles and four books. Tony’s latest, The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need—and What We Can do About It has been a best seller and is being translated into Chinese. His fifth book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change The World, will be published next April by Simon & Schuster. His other titles include: Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools,Making the Grade: Reinventing America’s Schools, and How Schools Change: Lessons from Three Communities Revisited. Tony has also recently collaborated with noted filmmaker Robert Compton to create a 60 minute documentary, “The Finnish Phenomenon: Inside The World’s Most Surprising School System.” Tony earned an M.A.T. and an Ed.D. at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.