Confirmed Presenters

Click on a speaker's name for more details.

Jean-Claude Bradley
Christopher Dede
John Horrigan
Diane Jass Ketelhut
George Mehler
David Rejeski
David Williamson Shaffer
Susan Yoon


Jean-Claude Bradley is associate professor of chemistry and e-learning coordinator for the College of Arts and Sciences at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He leads the UsefulChem project, an initiative started in the summer of 2005 to make the scientific process as transparent as possible by publishing all research work in real time to a collection of public blogs, wikis, and other Web pages. Bradley coined the term "open notebook science" to distinguish this approach from other more restricted forms of open science. Bradley teaches undergraduate organic chemistry courses with most content freely available online. Openness in research meshes well with openness in teaching. Real data from the laboratory can be used in assignments to practice concepts learned in class.

Bradley has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry and has published articles and obtained patents in the areas of synthetic and mechanistic chemistry, gene therapy, nanotechnology, and scientific knowledge management.

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Christopher Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. His fields of scholarship include emerging technologies, policy, and leadership. His funded research includes a grant from the National Science Foundation to aid middle-school students learning science via shared virtual environments and a Star Schools grant from the U.S. Department of Education to help high- school students with math and literacy skills using wireless mobile devices to create augmented reality situations. In 2007 he was honored by Harvard as an outstanding teacher. Dede has served as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Foundations of Educational and Psychological Assessment, a member of the U.S. Department of Education's Expert Panel on Technology, and as an International Steering Committee member for the Second International Technology in Education Study. He serves on advisory boards and commissions for PBS TeacherLine, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, and several federal research grants.

Dede is the coeditor of Scaling Up Success: Lessons Learned from Technology-Based Educational Improvement, published by Jossey-Bass in 2005. He is also the editor of Online Professional Development for Teachers: Emerging Models and Methods.

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John B. Horrigan is the associate director for research at the Pew Internet and American Life Project, where he studies online behavior on broadband Internet users and consumers of other leading-edge information technology. He also leads Pew's research on the Internet's impact on people's social networks and political engagement. He developed Pew's "Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users."

Horrigan received his Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Texas at Austin and his B.A. in government and economics from the University of Virginia. Prior to joining Pew, Horrigan was a staff officer for the Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy at the National Research Council. He also served as press secretary to former U.S. Congressman Jake Pickle.

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Diane Jass Ketelhut is an assistant professor of science education at Temple University in Philadelphia. Her research interests center on scientific inquiry, specifically looking at the effects of inquiry on science self-efficacy; using emerging technologies to deliver scientific inquiry curricula on student learning and engagement; helping teachers integrate scientific inquiry into their curricula; and different methods of assessing scientific inquiry. Her current federally funded projects include research on River City, a multi-user virtual environment designed to deliver engaging scientific inquiry-based curriculum to middle schoolers, "Science in the City," a standards-based scientific-inquiry after-school project for elementary- and middle-school students, and "e=mc²," an alternative mid-career math and science middle-school-teacher education program. In her teaching she provides students with scientific-inquiry experiments, both technological and hands-on, meant to engage them and challenge them to confront their own preconceptions.

Ketelhut holds certification in secondary-school science and was a science-curriculum specialist and teacher (science and math) for grades 5–12 for 12 years. She received an Sc.B. in biomedical sciences from Brown University, an M.Ed. in curriculum and instruction from the University of Virginia, and an Ed.D. in learning and teaching from Harvard University.

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George Mehler is currently the supervisor of science and technology for the Central Bucks School District and is an adjunct professor for Temple University. He is the creator and developer of learningscience.org, a Web site dedicated to sharing new and emerging online tools to help students learn science. This online clearinghouse for the best science interactives from all over the world is framed around the National Science Education Standards. The site averages over 500,000 hits each month from countries all over the world. In his earlier professional experiences Mehler taught middle-school and high-school science and was awarded the Biology Teacher of the Year Award in 1993 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.

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David Rejeski is the director of the Foresight and Governance Project and the Project on Emerging Technologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In 2002 he helped launch the Serious Games Initiative and in 2003, Games for Change. He is presently working on the development of new-media strategies to address environmental issues (with the Environmental Protection Agency) and on the National Budget Game, an online game designed to engage the American public in critical, long-term fiscal issues. Rejeski sits on the advisory boards of a number of organizations, including the Environmental Protection Agency's Science Advisory Board; the National Science Foundation's Advisory Committee on Environmental Research and Education; the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Rejeski has been a visiting fellow at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and an adjunct affiliated staff member at the RAND Corporation. He received a B.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and holds graduate degrees in public administration and environmental design from Harvard University and Yale University.

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David Williamson Shaffer is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the departments of Educational Psychology and Curriculum and Instruction, a game scientist at the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory, and a research associate in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Communication and Democracy. Before coming to the University of Wisconsin, Shaffer taught grades 4-12 in the United States and abroad, including two years working with the Asian Development Bank and the U.S. Peace Corps in Nepal. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has taught in the Technology and Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Shaffer studies how new technologies change the way people think and learn. His particular area of interest is the development of epistemic games: computer and video games in which players become professionals to develop innovative and creative ways of thinking. He is a founding member of the GAPPS research group for games, learning, and society, which recently received a $1.8 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study games and media literacy in the digital age.

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Susan Yoon is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. After working as a science teacher and department head of science for six years with the Toronto District School Board, Yoon received a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 2005. From 2003 to 2005 she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Teacher Education Program, where she managed a joint Santa Fe Institute–MIT National Science Foundation-funded ITEST project aimed at improving information technology skills among middle- and secondary-school teachers and students through the use of two computational complex-systems modeling tools: StarLogo and Participatory Simulations.

Building on her doctoral and postdoctoral work, Yoon is pursuing several lines of research, including investigating curricular applications and learning outcomes of using social-network graphs in decision making about socioscientific issues, understanding the dynamics of copying mechanisms in learning environments, applying complex-systems processes in teacher professional-development programs, surveying preservice and inservice teacher knowledge of complex systems, and understanding affordances and constraints to access and retention of K–12 and higher education students in STEM fields of study.