I was a University Scholar at Ohio State and received my doctorate in 1976, working with John Black in communication sciences. My wife, Gina, and I met at Ohio State, perhaps attracted by a common heritage. (Gina was born in San Antonio & I was born in Sinton, Texas, near Corpus Christi.) We came to Charlottesville in the bicentennial year.
Shortly after arriving Gina and I worked with Wes McDonald to construct the first microcomputer in the Curry School. This system was built using a technique known as "wirewrap," and had an Intel 8080 eight-bit microprocessor, four kilobytes of RAM and four kilobytes of ROM. It was programmed in 8080 assembly language using an assembler known as Arian developed by Alf Weaver in the Computer Science department. A 300 baud acoustic coupler connected it to an HP-2000 timeshare system. A teletype and paper tape reader was used as the principle input device.
We subsequently acquired a commercially developed microcomputer, an Apple II computer with eight kilobytes of memory (double the amount available in our homebrew system). This was followed by a North Star Horizon with 32 kilobytes of memory. These systems were used as the basis of the Curry School's first microcomputing class, Educational Applications of Computing.
The following summer Steve Tipps, Shirl Schiffman, and I offered an inservice course for classroom teachers. As a condition of participation, teachers were required to bring their own computers. I absorbed much of my educational philosophy from Shirl, and Gina and I subsequently named our son, Stephen, after Steve Tipps. (Steve went on to become the chair of the education department of his home town university in Wichita Falls, Texas. Shirl is now an instructional designer at Columbia Bible College in South Carolina, working with international educational programs.)
In the early 1980's I began working with Tim Sigmon in the University's computing center to explore ways to link K-12 teachers to the Internet. This led to establishment of a regional K-12 computing network, Teacher-LINK, in the mid-1980s. Teacher-LINK, in turn, was used as the prototype for one of the nation's first statewide K-12 networks, Virginia's Public Education Network (PEN). In the 1990's the text-based PEN interface was upgraded to a graphical Web-based interface, Anthology.
In the 1980's I was a founding member of the Virginia Society for Technology in Education (VSTE) and later served as its president. I also am a member of an international association of schools of education, the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) and served as president of that organization. My primary interest continues to be ways in which educational technologies allow us to reconceptualize K-12 education.