Faculty and Specializations

Dr. Jerald D. Cole, Chair (Columbia)

Networks and distributed learning systems, software evaluation, human factors, new media, mental imagery, visual literacy.

Dr. Cole has expertise in educational software evaluation, distance education, and non-traditional learning. He has served as a University Distance Learning Coordinator, and implemented online/televised teacher, trainer and developer tracks in higher education Instructional Technology programs. He also initiated and managed a blended model instructional program for teachers and trainers in an interstate partnership with several universities.

He has served in the capacities of Network Administrator, Internet Applications Developer, and Web Master. Dr. Cole has extensive experience establishing Web-presences for academic and corporate clients, including Warner Brothers Jazz Space, eLearningSpace, and viaMax. He was also Director of a New York-based information technologies training center, offering certification programs in Network Administration, Client-Server Development, and Project Management.

Dr. Larry Israelite (Arizona)

Dr. Israelite has extensive experience in designing and implementing employee development initiatives in a variety of subject areas, including leadership and management, project management, and customer service. He has significant expertise in e-learning, distance learning, and learning management system acquisition, implementation, management, and staff and budget management experience.

Vice President, Human Resources Development, Liberty Mutual Group. Formerly Director of Strategic Learning Services at Pitney Bowes; Vice President of Product Development, The Forum Corporation; General Director of Training and Development, John Hancock Financial Services; Director of Workforce Development, Oxford Health Plans; Corporate Distance Learning Manager, Digital Equipment Corporation.

Dr. Eliott Mordkowitz (Harvard)

Experimental psychology, cognitive science, technical communication, new media, corporate training.

Dr. Mordkowitz is a cognitive learning psychologist interested in how software can support rapid attainment of job performance in the knowledge intensive workplace.

He has participated in behavioral research since he was a teenager and was the first student to receive a combined four year bachelors and masters degree in experimental psychology at CUNY. At Harvard, he was the Social Science Dissertation Fellow in the psychology department.  His research there developed and tested a massively parallel computer model of human skill acquisition and diagnostic pattern recognition. He is also certified in technical communication and computer documentation.

Dr. Mordkowitz's areas of expertise include experimental cognition, psychology of language, human development theory, cognitive ergonomics and instructional design. He believes that cognitive research in the twenty first century will progress rapidly by focusing on environmental contexts that facilitate optimal use of components of the evolved human cognitive architecture. He has studied perceptual development, sequence learning, speech perception, decision making, logical reasoning, language development, prototype or schema theories of categorization and memory organization and also the motivational and cultural aspects of school learning.

Dr. Mordkowitz is a member of the American Psychological Society, Cognitive Science Society, and the International Society for Performance Improvement.

Dr. W. Curtiss Priest (Rensselaer)

Learning objects, instructional applications development, social implications, distributed learning systems.

Faculty, MIT Media Laboratory; Director, Center for Information, Technology, and Society; Cyber-Educator of the Year, Newsweek Magazine, December 1997.

Dr. Priest places the capabilities of Computer Science in the context of learning, government decision-making, and patient-health provider interactions.

As these contexts often require one-on-one learning, he has designed and implemented various P2P (peer-to-peer) communication systems.  Dr. Priest holds several patents in P2P technologies, and licensees have included Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Novell.

With regard to patient health and human values, Dr. Priest was Co-Principal Investigator in an NSF funded grant at MIT to better understand how communications users often pioneer the development of useful IT tools at MIT.

Recently, Dr. Priest has pioneered the use of P2P for matching the interests of students with the abilities of online mentors to help teach these students.

And, recognizing that there have been many duplicative, parallel efforts in IT and educational technology, Dr. Priest recently spoke to the members of the Association for the Advancement of Computers in Education (AACE), about how various "object oriented" activities have some things in common, such as the use of metadata, but, lack the ability to build objects in the fuller sense where objects can be created and additional objects can be created based on inheritance.  While the principals of inheritance, methods, and properties are common within a given computer language, these principals have yet to be translated to World Wide Web objects that can assure that each effort builds on the efforts of others.