Why are bios always written in the third person? They seem so impersonal...
I began life somewhere else entirely – as a music major at Marshall University near my hometown of Barboursville, WV. Like everyone else who was an undergrad in the early 90s, I got sucked completely into the Internet (and eventually became the webmaster at MU). Several band gigs and an internet consulting company later, I joined the PhD program in Instructional Psychology & Technology at Brigham Young University. It was during the summer of 1998, while cutting the grass in front of our Orem, Utah apartment, that I realized that someone should be championing the application of open source principles to materials other than software. In our tiny basement I coined the term "open content," launched the opencontent.org website, and collaborated with some great folks like Eric Raymond to create the first open license for content (Eric's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar is licensed under the Open Publication License).
A PhD, Postdoc, and National Science Foundation CAREER award later, I spend my energies on increasing access to educational opportunity. I still work on IP-related issues (with the CC Education License project), but spend most of my time trying to solve the problems related to informal learning with open educational resources in developing areas – teaching and learning with reusable educational resources, designing resources that are both effective and amenable to localization, developing infrastructure that supports the distribution and reuse of digital educational resources, combining innovative business models and distributed collaboration to insure the sustainability of our efforts. It's huge, complex, fun, and rewarding work.
Currently I'm an Assistant Professor of Instructional Technology at Utah State University, where I also serve as Director of the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning.
As a CIS Non-Residential Fellow, I am focusing on making the Creative Commons licenses more understandable by teachers and other producers of educational materials. Specifically, I'll be developing marketing materials that attempt simultaneously to be legally accurate and understandable even by college faculty. Folks from the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University and other places will then use these materials in their efforts to evangelize new OpenCourseWare and related projects. Of course, the materials will be CC licensed (Attribution-ShareAlike) to encourage the broadest adaptation and reuse possible.