Forum Network

Dr. Smith has been the Program Director for Education at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California since 2001. Prior to that, he was Acting Deputy Secretary and Under Secretary for Education in the Clinton Administration. During the Carter Administration, he was Chief of Staff to the Secretary for Education and Assistant Commissioner for Policy Studies in the Office of Education. While not in government, he was at different times an associate professor at Harvard, and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford. At Stanford, he was also the Dean of the School of Education. A member of the National Academy of Education and former chairman of the board of the American Institutes of Research, he has authored a large number of publications on topics varying from computer content analysis to early childhood education to effective schools and standards-based reform. Dr. Smith has served on numerous commissions and committees of the National Research Council and been a consultant to many government agencies, foundations, and nonprofit organizations such as the Education Testing Service, and to foreign governments. Dr. Smith earned a bachelor's degree at Harvard College and both a master's and a doctoral degree in Measurement and Statistics from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Annie Valva is Director of Research & Development for WGBH Interactive. Valva has over 15 years experience in developing interactive media, including broadband applications, enhanced TV, Web sites, and CD-rom/ DVDs. As Vice President of Content and Technology Integration for Pearson Broadband in London, she oversaw the development and launch of broadband services to primary school children throughout the U.K. Annie spent six years as Director of Technology for WGBH Interactive where she both managed the interactive technology team and produced prototypes for emerging digital platforms. She has worked extensively with high tech companies in order to develop partnerships that showcase high quality content across multiple distribution platforms. Annie earned her Masters in Educational Technology from Harvard University and received her BA in Community Studies and Photojournalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Over the past sixteen years Dave Johnston has overseen the development and implementation of many of the Public Broadcasting Service's business processes and information systems for the K-12 and higher education divisions. Johnston established PBS's first public Internet "gopher server" and in 1994, along with several colleagues, launched the first PBS Web site that was to become PBS Online. In his current role he is responsible for the technical infrastructure and services of PBS Online, the award-winning website that currently attracts more than 145 million page views per month and is the number one "Dot Org" site on the Internet (according to Nielsen NetRatings). Mr. Johnston has contributed to the "transition to digital broadcast" as PBS's representative to the ATSC T3/S17 specialist group working to create standards for the enhancement of digital television. He also served as the PBS member of the Advanced Television Enhancement Forum (ATVEF). Johnston lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and three children.

Andy Carvin is senior strategist for National Public Radios Social Media Desk. As coordinator of NPRs social media strategy, he has helped NPR programs learn how to use user-generated content, crowdsourcing and social networks to promote dialogue and collaboration with the general public. Prior to coming to NPR in 2006, Andy was the director and editor of the Digital Divide Network, an online community of more than 10,000 educators, community activists, policymakers and business leaders in over 140 countries working to find solutions to the digital divide. Andy is also author of the PBS blog learning.now (http://www.pbs.org/learningnow), which focuses on the impact of Internet culture on education.

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer and filmmaker, and founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years of operation.

Mitchell Kapor, is a pioneer of the personal computing revolution and has been at the forefront of information technology for 30 years as an entrepreneur, software designer, activist, and investor. He is widely known as founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer application" which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. Mr. Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1950 and graduated from Freeport (Long Island) High School in 1967. He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in Cybernetics. In 1978, he received a Master's degree in counseling psychology from Campus-Free College (later renamed Beacon College) in Boston and worked as a mental health counselor at New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts. He also attended the Sloan School of Management at MIT, taking a leave of absence one term short of graduation in 1980 in order to take a job in a Silicon Valley start-up company. In the fall of 2005 he became a Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-taught a course "Open Source Development and Distribution of Information". In 2006, he was appointed Adjunct Professor at the School of Information at U.C. Berkeley. Mr. Kapor has written widely about the impact of personal computing and networks on society. He has contributed articles, columns, and op-ed pieces on information infrastructure policy, intellectual property issues, and antitrust in the digital era to Scientific American, *The New York Times*, *Forbes*, *Tricycle: The Buddhist Review*, and *Communications of the ACM*.

Miri Navasky is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who began her career in television when she joined FRONTLINE in 1991. While on staff, she worked on numerous films, including The Killer at Thurston High (2000), which she co-produced with Karen O'Connor. This 90-minute film examined the life of a 15-year-old school shooter in Oregon and won the Banff award for best social/political documentary. In 2000, Navasky formed an independent production company, Mead Street Films, and continued her work with O'Connor producing films for FRONTLINE, including: A Crime of Insanity (2002), an in-depth investigation into the criminal case of a 26-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who killed himself behind bars; and The New Asylums (2005), an intimate and powerful portrait of the hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people incarcerated in jails and prisons across America. The film was nominated for an Emmy Award, earned the 2006 Robert F. Kennedy Grand Prize Award for Journalism and won the Excellence in Journalism Award from the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, marking the first time a television program received the award. In 2006, Navasky and O'Connor produced Living Old, a disturbing look at what it really means to grow old in contemporary America. O'Connor and Navasky's most recent production, The Undertaking, is a powerful and moving exploration of death and dying told through the perspective of writer/poet Thomas Lynch, an undertaker in Central Michigan whose family has cared for the dead for three generations. The film aired on PBS in the fall of 2007 and won an Emmy Award.

Curtis Wong is manager of the Microsoft Next Media Research Group, whose focus spans the linear and interactive media spectrum from television, broadband, and gaming to emerging media forms. The author of more than 20 patents pending in such areas as interactive television, media browsing, visualization, design, and mobile computing, Wong was previously Director of Intel Productions. At Intel, he was responsible for creating next generation content such as the Virtual Van Gogh Museum Tour; ArtMuseum.net, one of the first Web-based, broadband art exhibition networks; and the Whitney's American Century Exhibition. Wong was also the General Manager and Executive Producer of Corbis Productions, the digital image company started by Bill Gates, where he created a series of award winning CD-ROMs on subjects such as *A Passion for Art*, *FDR*, *Critical Mass*, and *Leonardo Da Vinci*. Prior to Corbis he was an interactive-documentary producer for the Criterion Collection, producing some of the first feature films on laserdiscs and multimedia CD-ROMs for the Voyager Company. Wongs work in interactive media has won many design and industry awards, including New York Film Festival Gold Medals, the ID Magazine Annual Design Award of Excellence, and Communication Arts Interactive award of Excellence. His collaboration with WGBH Interactive on the broadband-enhanced documentary *Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy*, won a 2002 Academy Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and was nominated for the first Interactive TV Emmy. He is currently working with WGBH *Frontline* on an enhanced broadband documentary for television/web scheduled to air in Summer 2006.