KEYNOTE PRESENTATION
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Laurence F. Johnson, Ph.D.
Chief Executive Officer of the New Media Consortium (NMC)
The Horizon Report: Emerging Technologies and the Future of Education |
BIOGRAPHY
Laurence F. Johnson, Ph.D. is Chief Executive Officer of the New Media Consortium (NMC), an international consortium of more than 250 world-class universities, colleges, museums, research centers, and technology companies dedicated to using new technologies to inspire, energize, stimulate, and support learning and creative expression. He is an acknowledged expert on the effective application of new media in many contexts, and has worked extensively to build common ground among museums and universities across North America and in more than a dozen other countries. He is the author a number of important books on the topic, and dozens of monographs, chapters, and articles exploring emerging trends and issues related to that work.
In his current post, Dr. Johnson routinely brings visionaries and thought leaders from across the globe together to define and explore new ways of thinking about and using technology, and to examine emerging trends and issues. The NMC’s annual Horizon Report has become one of the leading tools used by senior executives in universities and museums to set priorities for technology planning. NMC summits and large-scale projects have helped set the agenda for topics such as visual literacy, learning objects, educational gaming, the future of scholarship, and the new web. Recent examples are the NMC’s high-profile experimental campus in the virtual world of Second Life and its leadership role in the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning.
Having served as president and senior executive at institutions in both the higher education and not-for-profit realms, Dr. Johnson has more than 25 years of experience leading high-profile, high-stakes projects. His educational background includes an MBA in Finance and a Ph.D. in Education that focused on research and evaluation. Among many other recognitions, Dr. Johnson has been honored as a Distinguished Graduate by the University of Texas at Austin.
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W. A. "Bud" Baeslack III
Provost and Executive Vice President
Case Western Reserve University |
BIOGRAPHY
W. A. "Bud" Baeslack III, a native of greater Cleveland, earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from Ohio State, and went on to earn a doctorate in materials engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He spent 17 years at Ohio State, serving as a faculty member, department chair, associate dean and interim university vice president of research before becoming dean of engineering at RPI in 1999. He returned to Ohio State in 2004, recruited by a team that included Snyder, then Ohio State's interim provost.
As engineering dean at Ohio State, Baeslack led development of a performance plan for the college that resulted in increasing undergraduate enrollment, growth in research support and improved national rankings. At the same time, the College launched an innovative undergraduate engineering initiative, improved diversity among faculty and administrators and created several new interdisciplinary research centers.
Baeslack also participated in the development and implementation of a strategic plan at RPI, in which the school identified key priorities for interdisciplinary research. Baeslack helped recruit nearly 20 new faculty in such areas as Biotechnology, Nanotechnology/Advanced Materials and Information Systems. Over a four-year period the number of women who were tenured or tenure track grew by 70 percent, and the number of Hispanic and African-American tenured or tenure-track faculty also increased significantly.
At both Ohio State and RPI Baeslack was well-known for his success in developing partnerships with industry and government. Honda of America, for example, maintains a robust partnership with engineering at Ohio State that includes funding to promote awareness of engineering among high school students, especially women and underrepresented minorities, as well as scholarships and other programs to support new curricular initiatives.
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