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I am associate professor in the Technology in Education Program at National Louis University in Chicago. At National Louis, I also teach courses in the history and philosophy of education.

• Director of Chicago WebDocent, a curriculum collaboration of Chicago-area museums and Chicago Public Schools
• Director of Curriculum for CUIP (Chicago Public Schools/University of Chicago Internet Project)

I have also been involved with the following activities:

• Teaching a seminar on educational philosophy at in the Master's of Art Education program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• Teaching a course on New Technologies for Arts Organizations at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• Consulting with varous Chicago area organizations on technology integration into the curriculum
• Webbuilder for the Philosophy of Education Society
• Webbuilder for the John Dewey Society
• Secretary, Board of Directors, Dorchester Condominum Association

I was previously assistant professor in the College of Education at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. At Northeastern, I taught courses in the history and philosophy of education.

My research interests include the integration of the Internet into curriculum, the work of John Dewey (especially his theories of moral education; for sample online article, click here), the history of character education alternative approaches to substance abuse prevention; and the uses of technology in schools.

I have a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Curriculum from the Department of Education at the University of Chicago (R.I.P.). I also have an A.M. in curriculum from U. of C., and an A.B. in history (1983) from Lafayette College (where I was editor of The Lafayette--the oldest college newspaper in Pennsylvania--and a member of Pi Lambda Phi, a now-defunct fraternity housed in a mansion which is now a Bed and Breakfast).

After graduating from Lafayette, I was a student at (and then a dropout from) the Harvard Law School (1983-1984). For six months after that, I was Legal Assistant to Computer Systems of America, Inc., a Boston tax-shelter firm. In the fall of 1985, I began a three-year stint as math and science teacher at the Hyde School, in Bath, Maine. In the summer of 1987, I was a Klingenstein Summer Fellow at Teachers College, Columbia University, a program which convinced him to apply to graduate schools in education. Since leaving full-time graduate school, I worked for several years (1992-1995) as Director of Curriculum for the Hyde Foundation, a non-profit school reform organization based in Bath, which developed a public character-based school in New Haven, Connecticut, where I taught chemistry and math for the 1994-95 school year.

My Ph.D. dissertation was entitled "The Moral Consequences of John Dewey's Metaphysics." Dewey means by "metaphysics" something a bit different from the tradition of Plato and Aristotle; Dewey understood metaphysics to be an empirical survey of the generic traits of existences of all kinds. I argued that Dewey's ruminations about metaphysics were not tangential to his core themes, as some interpreters have suggested (e.g. Richard Rorty), but rather central and worth further exploration. Specifically, I suggested that Dewey's understanding of th role of ideals in moral life was dependent upon Dewey's naturalization of ideals as tools for the unification of actions. You can read a summary of the dissertation in an article I published in Philosophy of Education Annual. I am currently developing a better understanding of the role of generalizations in Dewey's theory of intelligence.