Dr. Patricia Hill Collins

Patricia Hill Collins is Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, former head of the Department of African American Studies at the University of Cincinnati and current President of the American Sociological Association Council. She came to national attention for her book Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, originally published in 1990.

Collins was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1948. The daughter of a factory farm worker and a secretary, Collins attended the Philadelphia public schools. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University in 1969, she earned a Master of Arts in teaching from Harvard University in 1970. Between 1970 and 1976, she was a teacher and curriculum specialist at St Joseph Community School, as well at two other community schools in Boston, Mass. She is the Charles Phelps Taft Emeritus Professor of Sociology (and formerly the Director) of the African American Center at Tufts University between 1976 and 1980 before completing her doctorate at Brandeis in 1984.

In 1990, her first book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, was published. A revised tenth anniversary edition of the book was published in 2000. It won the Jessie Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA) for significant scholarship in gender, and the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her second book, Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, 6th ed. (2007), edited with Margaret Andersen, is widely used in undergraduate classrooms in over 200 colleges and universities. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (Routledge, 2004) received ASA’s 2007 Distinguished Publication Award. Her other books include Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 1998); and From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism (Temple University Press in press for 2005). She has published many articles in professional journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Signs, Sociological Theory, Social Problems, and Black Scholar, as well as in edited volumes.

Professor Collins’s current research interests lie in:

1. investigating the actual and/or potential interconnections between critical race theory and American pragmatism;
2. theorizing intersectionality, namely, analyzing how race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nation mutually construct one another as concepts and as social phenomena;
3. exploring epistemologies of emancipatory knowledges, for example, ideologies of nationalism and feminism as well as influential knowledges of popular culture and everyday life; and
4. examining how the status of Black male and female youth sheds light on broader social processes such as globalization, transnationalism, class inequalities, racism and gender inequities.

Click the image below to watch Dr. Collins talk about her book entitled: Another Kind of Public Education.

Book Talk: Another Kind of Public Education

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Gloria Ladson-Billings, PhD

Gloria J. Ladson-Billings is an American pedagogical philosopher, author, scholar, and teacher educator, and is on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education. She received her Ph.D. in Curriculum & Teacher Education from Stanford University in 1984. Ladson-Billings addresses the issues of educational incongruity in teaching African American children in the 21st Century. She coined the term/notion of “culturally relevant teaching.” She is well known for her book entitled: The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children

Dr. Ladson-Billings was the President of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 2005. During the 2005 AERA annual meeting in San Francisco, Dr. Ladson-Billings delivered her Presidential Address, “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools,” in which she outlined what she called the “Education Debt” highlighting the combination of historical, moral, socio-political, and economic factors that have disproportionately affected African-American, Latino, Asian, and other non-white students. An audio clip of portions of that speech can be heard below. (listen to speech)

Here is a short clip of her at another speaking engagement.

Ladson-Billings on labeling children “at-risk”

We cannot saddle these babies at kindergarten with this label and expect them to proudly wear it for the next 13 years, and think, “Well, gee, I don’t know why they aren’t doing good.” So if anybody gets it, I know that writing project people know language matters. What you call something matters.

Ladson-Billings on unethical education practices

I do spend a fair amount of my time in schools. I get to hear many things about what’s quote “wrong with our students.” And one of the things I hear is that children lack exposure or experiences. I hear this really at the early level a lot. So as a consequence, many of their classroom days are filled with day after day after day of experiences, but little, if any, teaching. Now I do believe that schools can and should offer students some interesting and new experiences, but those experiences have to be tied to student learning. . . . To take kids to the zoo or to the amusement park without some learning link to it, particularly when none of these high-stakes tests are going to ask them or hold them accountable for whether or not they’ve been to Six Flags, it’s not only unfair, it’s unethical.

Ladson-Billings on reconceptualizing the racial achievement gap

Last year, in my American Educational Research Association presidential address in San Francisco, I challenged my colleagues in education research to reconceptualize this notion of the achievement gap and to begin to think about the incredible debt that we as a nation have accumulated. So rather than focusing on telling people to catch up, we have to think about how we, all of us, will begin to pay down this mountain of debt that we have amassed at the expense of entire groups of people and their subsequent generations.

Click here for an interview about ‘teacher quality’ with Dr. Ladson-Billings.

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Dr. Thurman Bridges - Postdoc at Columbia

Thurman Bridges is a teacher, scholar and educator whose focus is on teacher beliefs, including the ontologies, epistemologies, and pedagogies [beliefs and ways of teaching] of African-American male educators. His dissertation, Peace, Love, Unity and Having Fun: Storying the Life Histories and Pedagogical Beliefs of African-American Male Teachers from the Hip Hop Generation, examined the cultural contexts in which his participants’ experiences with Hip Hop culture, their motivations to teach, and their pedagogical approaches emerged.

Dr. Bridges earned his Doctorate of Philosophy in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Maryland, College Park where he was awarded the Promising Researching Fellowship by the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and honored as a Distinguished Teaching Assistant by the Graduate School and the Center for Teaching Excellence. He also holds both a Bachelors of Arts and a Masters degree in Teaching from the University of Virginia.

Prior to enrolling in graduate school, he was a middle school social studies teacher in Richmond, Virginia, where he was honored with the First Year Teaching Award.

Dr. Bridges is returning to the classroom this fall as a post-doctoral fellow with the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Columbia University. His research will focus on the life histories and identity development of African American male teachers from the Hip Hop Generation.

Thurman has appeared as speaker and moderator on several occasions and has authored many publications, including the contribution to a chapter in The SAGE Handbook of African American Education. Stay on the look out for his future work!

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If you or someone you know should be featured on The Black Scholars Index, please let us know – featured@blackscholarsindex.com.

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Risa Lavizzo-Mourey

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, M.D., M.B.A., is the fourth president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a position she assumed in January 2003. She originally joined the staff in April 2001 as the senior vice president and director, Health Care Group. In 2004, she was voted #22 of the Top 100 Most Powerful Women by Forbes Magazine.

Prior to coming to the Foundation, Lavizzo-Mourey was the Sylvan Eisman Professor of Medicine and Health Care Systems at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as director of the Institute on Aging. She was the deputy administrator of the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research now known as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality within the Department of Health and Human Services. While in government service, Lavizzo-Mourey worked on the White House Health Care Policy team, including the White House Task Force on Health Care Reform where she co-chaired the working group on Quality of Care.

Lavizzo-Mourey has served on many federal advisory committees, including the Task Force on Aging Research; the National Committee for Vital and Health Statistics, where she chaired the Subcommittee on Minority Populations; and the President’s Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry. She recently completed work as co-director of a congressionally requested Institute of Medicine study on racial disparities in health care resulting in the publication of Unequal Treatment, Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. She is the author of scores of articles and several books.

Listen to Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey talk about Childhood Obesity on WashingtonPost.com

Lavizzo-Mourey is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. She is the recipient of eight honorary doctorates and numerous other awards, including those received from the Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Health and Human Services, The National Academy of Sciences, American College of Physicians, National Library of Medicine, American Medical Women’s Association, National Medical Association and University of Pennsylvania.

Lavizzo-Mourey earned a medical degree at Harvard Medical School, followed by a master of business administration at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. After completing a residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her geriatrics training.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation conducts research and provides support in the following areas:

Visit their website for more information on their impact across the nation via the organization’s assessment report. They have an awesome website overall and a neat slide presentation builder used to help export data and create slideshows for website visitors.

Follow them on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/rwjf

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If you want someone specific featured on The Black Scholars Index, please let us know – featured@blackscholarsindex.com.

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Dr. Mark Dean

Mark Dean is an inventor and a computer scientist. He holds three of the nine original IBM patents upon which the IBM PC personal computers were based. He led the team that developed the ISA bus, and he led the design team responsible for creating the first one-gigahertz computer processor chip.

Born in Jefferson City, Tennessee, Dean holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Florida Atlantic University and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Dean is the first African-American to become an IBM Fellow which is the highest level of technical excellence at the company. In 1997, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Currently, he is an IBM Vice President overseeing the company’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.

Mark Dean 1998 holding the first Gigaherz (1000mhz) chip

Dean led a team that developed the interior architecture (ISA systems bus) that enables multiple devices, such as modems and printers, to be connected to personal computers. Dean made history again by leading the design team responsible for creating the first 1-gigahertz processor chip, another significant step in making computers faster and smaller.

Dr. Dean has said

“when I was accepted at Stanford I had been out of school for ten years, so it was very difficult. I encourage people to go on to graduate school, but they should not wait as long as I did. It makes it very hard, But for me it was definitely the right thing to do and Stanford was the right place to do it. In hindsight, Stanford was the best choice because I already knew what I wanted to work on and both David Dill and then Mark Horowitz enthusiastically supported me in pursuing the research tropic I wanted to work on. The research I engaged in as a graduate student was very prudent, in that while some of the technology isn’t necessarily what we are doing today, it did allow me to better understand the best ways (pros and cons of certain approaches) to approach the development of processes. I came to Stanford with no knowledge of either circuits or processes, I knew logic design, architectures, bus interfaces and protocol, but I had no real knowledge of transistors, silicon processes and circuits. Stanford was my first exposure to custom circuits design to building things at transistor level. I am now managing a group focused on high-speed circuit design and I couldn’t have done it without the background I received at Stanford.”

ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

***In 1995, Dr. Dean was named an IBM Fellow in 1995, one of only 50 active fellows of IBM’s 300,000 employees. Dean was the first African American to be honored with IBM Fellowship.

***In 1997 Dean was Vice President of Performance for the RS/6000 Division and, along with his colleague Dennis Moeller, Dean was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame which has under 150 members. For inventing “a system that has allowed PCs to become part of our lives.”

***In 1999, as Director of IBM’s Austin Research Lab (in Austin, Texas), he lead the team that built a gigaherz (1000mhz) chip which did a billion calculations per second.

***In 2001 he was elected member of the National Academy of Engineers (NAE) .

***In 2004, Dr. Dean was selected as one of the 50 Most Important Blacks in Research Science.

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If you would like to see someone featured on The Black Scholars Index, please let us know – featured@blackscholarsindex.com

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Henry Lewis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he is Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Recently, he became the Editor-In-Chief of The Root, a daily online magazine that provides thought-provoking commentary on today’s news from a variety of black perspectives. The site also hosts an interactive genealogical section to trace one’s ancestry through AfricanDNA.com, a DNA testing site co-founded by him.

He went to Yale and gained his B.A. summa cum laude in History. The first African-American to be awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the day after his undergraduate commencement, Gates set sail on the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 for the University of Cambridge, where he studied English literature at Clare College. With the assistance of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, he worked toward his Ph.D. in English. While his work in history at Yale had trained him in archival work, Gates’ studies at Clare introduced him to English literature and literary theory.

At Clare College, Gates was also able to work with Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian writer denied an appointment in the department because, as Gates later recalled, African literature was at the time deemed “at best, sociology or socio-anthropology, but it was not real literature.” Soyinka would later become the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize; he remained an influential mentor for Gates and became the subject of numerous works by Gates.

In October 1975, he was hired as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. In July 1976, Gates was promoted to the post of Lecturer in Afro-American Studies with the understanding that he would be promoted to Assistant Professor upon completion of his dissertation. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to Associate Professor in 1984. After being denied tenure, he left for Cornell in 1985, and stayed until 1989. After a two-year stay at Duke University, he moved to his current position at Harvard University in 1991. See Gates’ recent blog entry on The Root about the incident that occurred a few days ago in the news.

As a literary theorist and critic, meanwhile, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions; he draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to textual analysis and matters of identity politics.

As a black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon and has instead insisted that black literature must be evaluated by the aesthetic criteria of its culture of origin, not criteria imported from Western or European cultural traditions that express a “tone deafness to the black cultural voice” and result in “intellectual racism.” Gates tried to articulate what might constitute a black cultural aesthetic in his major scholarly work The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, a 1989 American Book Award winner; the work extended the application of the concept of “signifyin(g)” to analysis of African-American works and thus rooted African-American literary criticism in the African-American vernacular tradition.

While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of black literature and black culture, Gates does not advocate a “separatist” black canon but, rather, a greater recognition of black works that would be integrated into a larger, pluralistic canon. He has affirmed the value of the Western tradition but envisions a loose canon of diverse works integrated by common cultural connections:

“Every black American text must confess to a complex ancestry, one high and low (that is, literary and vernacular) but also one white and black…there can be no doubt that white texts inform and influence black texts (and vice versa), so that a thoroughly integrated canon of American literature is not only politically sound, it is intellectually sound as well.“

Moreover, Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes and maintains that it is “ridiculous” to think that only blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. He argues, “It can’t be real as a subject if you have to look like the subject to be an expert in the subject,” adding, “It’s as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn’t appreciate Shakespeare because I’m not Anglo-Saxon. I think it’s vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a black mouth or a white mouth.”

Mediating a position between radicals advocating separatism and traditionalists guarding a fixed, highly homogeneous Western canon, Gates has faced criticisms from both sides; some criticize that the additional black literature will diminish the value of the Western canon, while separatists feel that Gates is too accommodating to the dominant white culture in advocating integration.

As a literary historian committed to the preservation and study of historical texts, Gates has been integral to the Black Periodical Literature Project, an archive of black newspapers and magazines created with financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities. To build Harvard’s visual, documentary, and literary archives of African-American texts, Gates arranged for the purchase of “The Image of the Black in Western Art,” a collection assembled by Dominique de Ménil in Houston, Texas. Earlier, as a result of his research as a MacArthur Fellow, Gates had discovered Our Nig, the first novel in the United States written by a black person, Harriet E. Wilson, in 1859; he followed this discovery with the acquisition of the manuscript of The Bondswoman’s Narrative, another narrative from the same period.

As a prominent black intellectual, Gates has focused throughout his career not only on his research and teaching but on building academic institutions to study black culture. Additionally, he has worked to bring about social, educational, and intellectual equality for black Americans and has written pieces in The New York Times that defend rap music and an article in Sports Illustrated that criticizes black youth culture for glorifying basketball over education. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. Gates’ prominence in this field led to him being tapped as a witness on behalf of the controversial Florida rap group 2 Live Crew in their obscenity case. He argued the material the government alleged was profane, actually had important roots in African-American vernacular, games, and literary traditions and should be protected.

Asked by NEH Chairman Bruce Cole about how Gates would describe what he does, Gates responded, “I would say I’m a literary critic. That’s the first descriptor that comes to mind. After that I would say I was a teacher. Both would be just as important.

In 1999, Gates consulted with Anthony Appiah in the creation of Microsoft Encarta Africana Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Black History and Culture (First edition ed.). Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corp. ISBN 0735600570.

Check out additional work by Dr. Gates.

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If you have suggestions for features on The Black Scholars Index, please contact us immediately – featured@blackscholarsindex.com.

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The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (part of NY Public Libraries)

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a national research library devoted to collecting, preserving and providing access to resources documenting the experiences of peoples of African descent throughout the world. The Center’s collections first won international acclaim in 1926 when the personal collection of the distinguished Puerto Rican-born Black scholar and bibliophile, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, was added to the Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints of the 135th Street Branch of The New York Public Library. In the 1930s and 1040s, renowned librarian Augusta Baker pioneered the efforts in what was then the 135th Street Branch of the New York Library to provide access to more African-American children’s books. At the time, there were only 27 books about ‘the American Negro’ suggested for inclusion in all school libraries and only four (4) of them were written for children:

Augusta Baker, Renowned Librarian

1. For Freedom by Arthur Fauset
2. Popo and Fifina by Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes
3. Upward Path by M. T. Pritchards
4. African Myths by Carter G. Woodson

However, Arturo Schomburg and James Weldon Johnson were instrumental in helping Augusta Baker purchase 40 books for the 135th Street Branch library in Harlem, NY. The 3 criteria for evaluation of purchased books were:

1. Language – could not be dialect-laden or include derogatory terms such as darkie
2. Theme – characters could not be presented as “a clown or a buffoon whose only object in life [was] to serve his master faithfully and without question”
3. Illustration [most important] – could not offer insulting caricatures of African-Americans.

These books along with the ultimate donation of Arthur Schomburg’s private collection of literature and artifacts ultimately became the Schomburg Center.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

Schomburg served as curator from 1932 until his death in 1938. Renamed in his honor in 1940, the collection grew steadily through the years. In 1972 it was designated as one of The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library and became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Today, the Schomburg Center contains over 10,000,000 items and provides services and programs for constituents from the United States and abroad.

The Center provides access to and professional reference assistance in the use of its collections to the scholarly community and the general public through five research divisions, each managing materials in specific formats but with broad subject focus. The Center’s collections include art objects, audio and video tapes, books, manuscripts, motion picture films, newspapers, periodicals, photographs, prints, recorded music discs and sheet music.

The Schomburg Center facilitates access to these holdings through mail and telephone reference services, participation in national computerized databases and publication of bibliographies and other finding aids.

Library materials at the Schomburg Center are housed in five collection divisions, according to format:

• Art and Artifacts Division
• General Research and Reference Division
• Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division
• Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division
• Photographs and Prints Division

The Schomburg Center promotes the study of the histories and cultures of peoples of African descent and interprets its collections through exhibitions, publications and educational, scholarly and cultural programs.

For more information, visit: http://www.nypl.org/research/sc/sc.html

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If you or someone you know would like to featured on The Black Scholars Index, please let us know – featured@blackscholarsindex.com.

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Dr. Kevin Clark

Kevin Clark, Ph.D. holds a bachelors and masters degree in computer science from North Carolina State University, and a Ph.D. in Instructional Systems from Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Clark is currently an associate professor in the Instructional Technology, and director of the Center for Digital Media Innovation and Diversity at George Mason University.

Before joining the faculty at George Mason University, Dr. Clark was an assistant professor in the Educational Technology department at San Jose State University. Prior to his work in academia, Kevin worked as a designer and senior program manager of educational software and interactive media for Lightspan, Inc. (now Plato Learning), and was the founder/director of a non-profit community-based after-school program in San Diego, CA.

Dr. Clark’s research interests include the role of video games and interactive media in the education of children, particularly from underserved communities. His recent scholarly activities focus on the use of video game design to increase interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers, and issues of diversity in the design and development video games and other educational media. Dr. Clark has presented at national and international conferences, and has published numerous scholarly publications. The video below is from The George Lucas Foundation and Edutopia where Dr. Clark and this project was featured.

For more information about Dr. Clark and this project, review this George Mason article.

For more information, please visit http://mason.gmu.edu/~kclark6.

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Dr. Robbin Chapman

Dr. Robbin Chapman is currently the Manager of Diversity Recruitment for the MIT School of Architecture and Planning where she is responsible for strategic leadership and development of faculty and graduate student recruitment programs and initiatives. Dr. Chapman received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006.

She conducted her dissertation research at the MIT Media Laboratory, where she explored computational tools and practices for promoting critical reflection embedded in design-based learning activities. Her theoretical framework, Cooperative Constructionism, establishes a design-based approach to critical reflection. Dr. Chapman has several publications about her research, including the newly published book, The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities and chapters in Social Capital and Information Technology, Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators.

She has presented her work at numerous conferences and invited talks. She also develops workshops for exploring creative ways of leveraging technology for deeper learning. She earned her S.M. degree at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where she developed a novel method for robust sign language identification. She is the recipient of, with a group of colleagues from several universities, a CILT (Center for Innovation in Learning Technologies) grant to investigate equity issues as they relate to the use of technology in education.

She currently serves as Regional Liaison for the Ford Diversity Fellowship program, sponsored by the National Academies of Science. Dr. Chapman has also served as Assistant Program Director for NASA’s Space Life Sciences Training Program at Kennedy Space Center, where she was responsible for all aspects of program logistics and administration. She was also a member of the LSSF (Life Sciences Support facility) flight hardware team, which develops technologies to support life science experiments aboard the Space Shuttle. Her projects at NASA include work on the Variable Speed Mid-Deck Centrifuge (VSMDC), Algae Liquid Fixation Apparatus (ALFA), and the Microgravity Plant Nutrient Experiment (MPNE). She served as Science Instructor for the Eureka math and science program for teenage girls desiring careers in science.

In her spare time, Dr. Chapman volunteers at after-school centers, working primarily with underserved communities and as a peer counselor for at-risk teens. She is a founding member of the Habibis, MIT’s Middle Eastern dance troupe and has been performing with the group for over six years. Additionally, she has been very active in numerous MIT student and community initiatives.

The Clubhouse Clubhouse - Book Cover

ABOUT THE BOOK
This book is about the Computer Clubhouse — the idea and the place — that inspires youth to think about themselves as competent, creative, and critical learners. So much of the social life of young people has moved online and participation in the digital public has become an essential part of youth identities. The Computer Clubhouse makes an important contribution not just in local urban communities but also as a model for after-school learning environments globally. The model has been uniquely successful scaling up, with over 100 clubhouses thriving worldwide. Showcasing research by scholars and evaluators that have documented and analyzed the international Computer Clubhouse Network, this volume considers the implications of their findings in the context of what it means to prepare youth to meet the goals of the 21st Century.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Yasmin B. Kafai is a Professor of Learning Sciences at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Kylie A. Peppler is an Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington. Robbin N. Chapman is a learning technologies consultant and researcher, and serves as Manager of Diversity Recruitment for the MIT School of Architecture and Planning

Contributors: Brenda Abanavas, Gail Breslow, Grace Chiu, Stina Cooke, Shiv Desai, Patricia DÃ az, Rosaline Hudnell, John Maloney, Amon Millner, Jesse Moya, Mitchel Resnick, Natalie Rusk, and Elisabeth Sylvan

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Today, BSI highlights the Damon J. Keith Law Collection of Africa-American Legal History at Wayne State Law School. Here’s a bit of information from its website.

The collection, initiated by Professor Emeritus Edward J. Littlejohn, is dedicated to recording the history of African American lawyers and judges. It was created to meet the need for a central repository for the nation’s African-American legal history.

The collection intends to use its endowment, now exceeding $2.1 million dollars to gather oral histories, support lectures and research, provide educational teaching materials and traveling exhibits, and generally assist in the preservation and popularization of the lessons learned during the course of the historic struggle of the African American people for democracy in the United States.

Since September 5 2004, the site has had a little under 10,000 visits (9,700). Let’s see if we can increase this number a bit!

Visit today! http://keithcollection.wayne.edu/

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Dr. Adriane Randolph Brain-Computer Interfaces

In case you haven’t heard, Dr. Adriane Randolph, Director of the BrainLab – Coles College of Business, Kennesaw State University, “is working to discover impactful solutions for brain-computer interfaces by uncovering the underlying characteristics that effect users’ control.”

Paul Harvey of SmartBusiness asked, “But what if technology could bypass disabilities, allowing humans to conquer genetics or disease and enable a return to a normal or improved life?” He got a bit closer to the answer in his interview with Dr. Adriane Randolph. They discussed these and other questions:

• What are brain-computer interfaces?
• What types of brain-computer interfaces are studied?
• Who are ideal candidates for these interfaces?
• What is the biggest challenge of changing thoughts into actions?
• How might brain-computer interfaces cut across business methodologies?

You can read more about the answers to these questions in this 2008 SmartBusiness article.

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