Department of Computer Science
Brown University -- Roger_Blumberg@Brown.edu
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~rbb/rbb.cv2008.html
2006-present: Visiting Scientist, Department of Computer Science, Brown University.
2000-present: Lecturer, Department of History, Philosophy and Social Science (HPSS), at The Rhode Island School of Design. I teach courses in Science and Technology Studies, including "Computing and Its Consequences," in the Liberal Arts Division of RISD.
2000 - present: Technology and Education Program Evaluator and Consultant. I am the founder of Mendele Education LLC (http://www.mendele.com/edu/), a company specializing in program and curriculum evaluation. Current projects include the evaluation of the NSF-sponsored TeachScheme/ReachJava Project (http://www.teach-scheme.org/), and the Northeastern/Microsoft-sponsored Bootstrap Project. In past years Mendele has evaluated the NSF-sponsored TeachScheme! Project, and led workshops about teaching & technology for K-12 and undergraduate faculty throughout the US.
1998 - 2005: Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Brown University. I redesigned and taught the Educational Software Seminar (CS92/ED89), and a First-Year Seminar titled "Computers and Human Values" (CS009). From 1998-2001 I was a Lecturer in the Department, teaching only CS92/ED89. My research concerns computers and education, as well as the philosophy of technology, with special emphasis on the production and evaluation of educational software.
2003 - 2004: Senior Fellow for Teaching and Technology, The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, Brown University. Appointed to this position by the Dean of the Faculty at Brown, and charged with promoting discussions of ways that higher education faculty across the country are using digital technologies and networked computing to rethink teaching, I host a monthly seminar titled "Computers, Teaching and Course (Re)Design," http://www.cs.brown.edu/~rbb/ctcr/.
1986 - 2001: Faculty, Summer Program for High School Students, Columbia University. Each July I taught a four-week mathematics course to high school juniors and seniors, using a curriculum that I created and modified during those fifteen years.
1999 - 2000: Senior Fellow in Instructional Technology, The Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning at Brown, Brown University. I designed and led the year-long Faculty Technology Seminar and participated in the Center's various activities for faculty development.
1998 - 1999: Institute Fellow, Institute for Elementary and Secondary Education, Brown University. My work at the Institute included the evaluation of educational technology projects at Brown, assisting with the Technology Leadership Workshop and leading the Technology and Education Workshop.
1998 - 1999: Senior Technology Specialist, The Education Alliance at Brown, Brown University. At the Alliance I work on several educational technology projects, including Brown's participation in the Northeast Technology in Education Consortium (NetTech), and the evaluation of the "Take Off!" program, sponsored by NASA and carried out by the Massachusetts Corporation for Educational Telecommunications (MCET).
1993 - present: Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Brain and Neural Systems, Department of Physics, Brown University. I am involved in an ongoing research program, directed by Dr. Leon N Cooper, concerning the nature and role of synaptic plasticity in learning and memory. My research concerns the computer simulation and mathematical analysis of both supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms.
1996 - 1997 : Senior Hypermedia Researcher, Scholarly Technology Group, Computing and Information Services, Brown University. At STG, my research concerned the analysis and identification of promising and best practices in educational hypermedia, particularly in secondary school and undergraduate classrooms, and the development of electronic, distributed curricula. Educational technology project details are available at the STG web site: http://www.stg.brown.edu/
1995-1996: Correspondent for the electronic AAAS/Science site: Next Wave (http://sci.aaas.org/nextwave/). I was a columnist for the "In the Loop" section, which included reports from an international network of correspondents, meant to address issues faced by young scientists working throughout the world.
2002 - 2005: Computers and Human Values (CS009), one of the inaugural First-Year Seminars at Brown. The course presents current topics and issues in computer science and information technology in the context of questions that have characterized the liberal arts (and sciences) for centuries.
1998 - 2005: The Educational Software Seminar (CS092/ED089), a course offered by the Computer Science and Education departments, in which groups of undergraduates work with local teachers to design, create and implement classroom software. The Seminar, which has existed at Brown for more than a decade, remains unique in American universities as a form of university-school, university-community collaboration in the area of technology.
Summer 2002: As Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Biology, Columbia University, I taught a 9-week intensive version of Biology S1002y, "Theory and Practice of Science." The course is the second semester of Science C1001-1002 (see 1984-1992 below).
1998: As Institute Fellow, in the Institute for Elementary and Secondary Education at Brown, I taught a five-session Technology and Education seminar, as part of the IESE's professional development series for teachers and technology coordinators in Rhode Island. See http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/rbb/TechEd/.
1984-1992: As Associate in Science at Columbia College, Columbia University, I was a teacher and Director of the course "Theory and Practice of Science" (Science C1001-2). The two-semester course combined units in applied mathematics, atomic physics, and molecular genetics, and used original science papers as the basis for study. The course received funding from Exxon, the Mellon Foundation, the Abe Wouk Foundation, and Columbia University, and has been recognized as a model in undergraduate science education by a number of national organizations, including the AAAS, and the AAC.
1987-1992: As Visiting Faculty in Mathematics and Science at Eugene Lang College, at The New School for Social Research, I designed and taught several courses in the "Science, Technology and Power" concentration, including: "Infinite Sets and Series", "The Evolution of Probability", "Mathematical Models and Molecular Genetics", "Models and Methods of/for the Mind-Brain" (with Dr. Larry Amsel), "Biological Evolution from Lamarck to Nei", and "Mathematical Models and the Discovery of Nuclear Fission".
1986-1989: As Instructor in the Humanities at Columbia College, Columbia University, I taught the course "Methods of Critical Analysis", a one- semester introduction to the Humanities "core" curriculum, designed for selected First-Year undergraduates.
1984-1988: As a member of the faculty of The Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP) at Columbia College, Columbia University, I designed and taught a five-week intensive course called "Introduction to Science Theory". The course was designed specifically for academically disadvantaged students who had been admitted to the College.
1988: As Instructor at the Empire State College for Labor Studies, SUNY, New York, I taught a course entitled "Early Scientific Revolutions", in which primary texts, beginning with Aristotle's Physics and concluding with Galileo's Dialogue, were used as the basis for study.
1987-2001: Summer Program for High School Students, Division of Special Programs, Columbia University. Each year I teach a four-week intensive course called "Foundations of Mathematics", covering a variety of topics in discrete mathematics, to approximately 85 high school students. Details can be found in the course Web pages (http://www.cs.brown.edu/~rbb/summermath/
1990-1992: The Columbia Science Honors Program, Department of Physics, Columbia University (a mathematics and science program for advanced high school students). I designed and taught a course in discrete mathematics during the Spring semesters.
1984-86: Teacher of English, Theodore Roosevelt Evening School, Bronx, New York. I taught twelfth-year English.
1983-85: Teacher of English, John F. Kennedy High School, Bronx, New York. I taught English 10 and 11. I did my student-teaching at Kennedy as well, during the Fall of 1982.
In addition, several of my Lang seminars included students from alternative high schools, such as The Urban Academy and Central Park East High School, as part of Lang's high school collaborations (supported by the Diamond Foundation).
1979-1983: Columbia College, Columbia University. B.A. in English and Comparative Literature.
1981-1983: Barnard Education Program, Barnard College, Columbia University. Certified and licensed teacher of high school English, in New York State. (Licensed in Day High School English, in the City of New York, in 1984.)
"Teaching, Information and Restraint", The Teaching Exchange (Brown University), Vol. 8, Number 1, January 2003.
"Resources, Constraints and the CMS", The Teaching Exchange (Brown University), Vol. 7, Number 1, September 2002.
"To Use or Not to Use?: Is That the Question?", The Teaching Exchange (Brown University), Vol. 6, Number 1, January 2002.
"Lessons from Consumerism: A Note for Faculty Thinking About Technology,", The Teaching Exchange (Brown University), Vol. 3, No. 3, January 2000.
"Collaborating for Courseware," with David Niguidula and Andries van Dam, Technos, Spring 1999, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 13-15.
"Electronic Documentation and the Scholarship of Teaching: Lessons from CS092", The Teaching Exchange (Brown University), vol 3, num. 1, September, 1998.
"The Uniqueness of CS92." conduit!, 8 1:4-6, Spring 1999 (Department of Computer Science, Brown University).
"Questions and Traditions in Educational Hypermedia," For Your Electronic Information (FYEI): The Information Services Newsletter of The City University of New York, (NY: CUNY/CIS Documentation), Spring 1997. Author's electronic version at http://www.stg.brown.edu/~rog/talks/fyei97.html.
"Hypermedia, Teaching and Technology," Louisiana Educational Technology Review vol. 5, #2 (Spring 1997). p. 10, and http://etrc33.usl.edu/etrc/libr/reviews/Spring97/pg-10-11.html#3.
MendelWeb, 6th edition (http://www.mendelweb.org/, 97.1).
"Ex Libris: Glimpsing the Future of Education by Navigating the Web"The Sciences. September/October 1995 35 5: 16-19. This article was reprinted in the Journal of College Science Teaching, XXV, 3:184-187, and is also available with my comments at MendelWeb (http://www.mendelweb.org/MWsciences.final.html)
"Penal Decision: A Mathematical Model," in Richard Mowery Andrews, The System of Criminal Justice, Volume 1: Law, Magistracy and Crime in Old Regime Paris, 1735-1789, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 505-514.
"MendelWeb: An electronic science/math/history resource for the WWW," Second International WWW Conference '94: Advance Proceedings, 1, pp. 449-458 (http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/IT94/Proceedings/Educ/blumberg.mendelweb/MendelWeb94.blumberg.html)
"Museums, Public Lands and Billboards: Toward a philosophy of the World Wide Web," Second International WWW Conference '94: Advance Proceedings, 1, pp. 449-458. (http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/IT94/Proceedings/Overviews/blumberg.museums/WebPhil94.Blumberg.html)
"Wave Particle Images: Some Questions Concerning Representational Dissatisfaction", in Begetting Images, ed. Mary Campbell and Mark Rollins (Peter Lang, 1989), pp. 11-26.
"Technology, Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: A Dialogue", with Tom Dean. conduit!, 9 1: 1-7, Spring 2000 (Department of Computer Science, Brown University).
"Asynchronous Learning Networks at Brown University: Phase One Evaluation of the Chemistry 21 Project". Institute for Elementary and Secondary Education, Department of Education, Brown University. May 1999. The URL for the PDF version of this report is available by request.
with David Reville. NetTech Website Review. STG Technical Report 1997: no. 2. (http://www.stg.brown.edu/pub/NetTechWeb.tr97.2.html)
with Santiago Barona and Richard Goerwitz. The New Hampshire Data Collection Project. STG Technical Report 1997: no. 3. (http://www.stg.brown.edu/pub/NHData.tr97.3.html)
Hypermedia, Teaching and Technology, 2nd edition (http://www.stg.brown.edu/edu/HTT96/, 96.2 ).
with H. Goldstein, J.L. Gross, and R.E. Pollack. The Scientific Experience, 2 vol., (unpublished manuscript). A textbook for the course "Theory and Practice of Science."
"The Popular Origins of Darwin's Origin of Species". Prepared for the faculty of the Columbia College core-curriculum course, "Contemporary Civilization". Presented at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, March 1995.
"The Voice of Science From Bacon to Frye". An essay prepared for the faculty of the Columbia College course "Contemporary Civilization." Presented at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, November 1994.
"What Darwinism Is," and "Robert Chambers and Darwinism". Essays prepared for the faculty of the Columbia College core-curriculum course, "Contemporary Civilization." Presented at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, March 1993 and 1994.
"The Oldenburg Revolution, ". A paper presented in two parts, to the faculty of the course Contemporary Civilization (C1001-1002), at Columbia University, on the subject of the 17th century English science. Part 1 was presented in 1989 and part 2 in 1990. Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University.
"Reading Barbara McClintock: Thoughts about the Grammars of Science". Using Zellig Harris' analyses of scientific "sub-languages", this 1989 paper discussed some linguistic aspects of the problems of the reception of McClintock's work between 1940 and 1970. Presented to the Society of Fellows, as part of the "Cultures in Conflict" symposium, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University.
"Theory and Practice of Science: Science as General Education" A talk given at the 1988 Nash Symposium, Department of Chemistry, Harvard University.
2008: Board Chair, The Rhode Island Council for the Humanities (RICH). I have been a member of the Board since 2006.
2008: Curator of the Caliper Studio site, http://www.jcalipens.com, which collects and exhibits the pens of the artist Joe Cali.2001 - 2006: Member of the Editoral Board of Computers and the Humanities, the official journal of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. and currently edited by Nancy Ide and Elli Mylonas. I review manuscripts in the areas of educational computing, and the history of computer science.
2001-2002:: Consultant to the Murdock Technology Initiative, Association of Independent Colleges of Washington. I designed and lead a series of workshops about Teaching and Technology, for members of the Education Department faculties at Seattle University, Pacific Lutheran University, Seattle Pacific University, and the University of Puget Sound.
1998- 2000: Member of the Technology Advisory Panel to the State of Ohio, a group appointed by the Governor of Ohio for the purposes of the evaluation of the Ohio SchoolNet program by KPMG.
1996 - 1998: Member of the Executive Committee and Planning Board of NetTech, a consortium of universities and educational research institutions, including Brown University, providing technology assistance to school districts and state education departments throughout the Northeastern United States. NetTech is funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
World Wide Dubliners, co-authored with Professor Wallace Gray of Columbia University. An annotated and collaborative hypertext version of James Joyce's Dubliners. Professor Gray died in 2002, before the project could be complted. The URL may be requested, but the resource is not publicly available.
While with the Scholarly Technology Group I gave a series of talks to K-16 teachers about MendelWeb, distributed curriculum, and the use of Web-based and other networked technologies. The slides for many of these talks are available at http://www.stg.brown.edu/pub/slides/roger/.