- I am currently providing CTO technology consulting services and other educational software services to a number of organizations through Learning Tapestry. Mixrun is currently serving as a holding company for some personal projects.
- As of January 2014, I stopped working as a consultant with the Federal Government entirely. I am grateful to the teams there who welcomed me in to work on some very hard problems. I think we developed some very interesting if sometimes controversial approaches: Learning Registry, Race to the Top and Race to the Top Assessment.
- Beyond the government policy and technology work, I have done some interesting projects over the last few years under the auspice of Mixrun. I helped Mozilla on their Open Badges project. I taught a class down at Stanford and one at NYU recently. And I have worked with a number of commercial and non-profit organizations. From May to June 2012, I served on the California Department of Education's Education Technology Task Force, which was tasked to create an education technology plan, based on the National Education Tech Plan I contributed to while in DC.
- From May 2010 to January 2012 I served as the Special Assistant to the Secretary of Education, acting as the Deputy Director for Education Technology at the US Department of Education. My work was focused on helping the education sector during its transition from primarly print-based classrooms to much more digitally-intensive learning environments. This involved a lot of work on a project called the Learning Registry, which is designed to make federal educational content available in an integrated manner to the public. While at the FCC, we made several recommendations along these lines. It was actually a pleasant experience to eat my own dog food by helping to implement those recommendations.
- From August 2009 to March 2010, I served as the Director of Education for the National Broadband Plan run by the FCC. This work involved developing a national strategy for making use of broadband infrastructure to improve educational outcomes. Our work led to a set of findings and recommendations that were published in the National Broadband Plan and sent to Congress in mid-March. Many of those recommendations were subsequently implemented by the FCC, due in no small part to the work of many other people and organizations including Richard Culatta at the US Dept of Education, the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, hardworking policy makers and lawyers at the FCC, Evan Marwell at Education Superhighway and Russ Selken, the E-Rate coordinator for California.
- As the principal of Mixrun, a CTO consulting firm, I've worked in a number of sectors including real estate, internet technology, education, venture investment and innovation consulting. Notably I worked with the California Department of Education on a project called Brokers of Expertise, which uses on-line and real world systems to share and build the expertise of educators.* I also worked as the consulting CTO for BizQuest.com, helping to reduce its costs, hire and develop staff, and improve technical performance. BizQuest was subsequently acquired in early 2010.
- Prior to Mixrun, I served as a Program Manager for the Stupski Foundation for six years, where I designed and implemented various grants for technology in K-12 education. I also worked actively across the country with a number of K-12 Districts and other agencies. I also wrote and co-authored a number of articles and papers while there, including this book chapter with Jeff Wayman and Sam Stringfield, and this article on Open Philanthropy for First Monday.
- From 1996 to 2001 I worked as Vice President of Engineering and Software Architect for LoopNet Inc., a commercial real estate listing firm. I designed and built LoopNet's technology and web systems from its inception in 1995 (from napkins). I left the company in early 2001 to get involved with non-profit and philanthropic work. LoopNet remains a successful business and was listed on NASDAQ from 2006 to 2012, at which point it was acquired by another public company.
- I reside in Berkeley California.
- I like to contribute to open source software projects including some I've developed from the ground up. I've built a simple Ruby image library called MojoMagick and a Ruby Hash Merge technology called DeepMerge (now maintained on Github). At various points, I've also been an active participant on the Postgres SQL language group. I went to RailsConf 2008 to talk about internet search techniques. I also attended what is perhaps the greatest (as in excellent) programmers conference held to date, called RubyFringe, in Toronto in 2008.
- Addenda/Errata at misuse.org/science * For more on Brokers of Expertise see the article I wrote for CETPA on this subject.
Also this video gives a good explanation of how the system currently works.
