About the Speakers and Panelists


About the Institute
Steering Committee
Institute Teams
Subject Area Teams
Program of Events
Electronic Poster

David Blakesley, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Kenneth D. Crews, Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis
Dr. Stephen C. Ehrmann, The Teaching, Learning and Technology Affiliate of the American Association for Higher Education
William H. Graves, COLLEGIS Research Institute
Bruce H. Leland, Western Illinois University
Barbara J. O'Keefe, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Dr. Keith R. Sanders, Illinois Board of Higher Education


David Blakesley, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

    David Blakesley is Associate Professor of English and Director of Writing Studies at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where he also serves as the English Department's webmaster. His scholarly interests are in the areas of rhetorical theory and film. He has presented papers at numerous national conferences, including the Modern Language Association, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Literature and Film Association, the Popular Culture Association, and the International Rhetoric Council. He is also the founding editor of Rhetorical Philosophy and Theory, a new book series published by Southern Illinois University Press. As Director of Writing Studies, he coordinates a large composition program consisting of over 90 graduate teaching assitants, an innovative "Directed Self-Placement" and Stretch Program, and several writing centers and computer classrooms.

    Professor Blakesley's work as a webmaster can be viewed at his Department's site or at The Virtual Burkeian Parlor, the companion website for Burke-L--the Kenneth Burke Discussion List - which he created in 1996 and still moderates. Blakesley has introduced asynchronous learning technologies into his teaching, having run a graduate seminar for new teachers of writing using First Class software in Fall 1997, which he will discuss at FSI '98 and Computers and Writing '98.

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Kenneth D. Crews, Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis

    Kenneth Crews is an Associate Professor in the Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis and in the IU School of Library and Information Science.  He is also Director of Indiana University's Copyright Management Center based at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI).

    Professor Crews brings a variety of academic and professional experiences to his duties at the University.  He earned his undergraduate degree in history from Northwestern University and received his law degree from Washington University in St. Louis.  He practiced general business and corporate law in Los Angeles from 1980 to 1990, primarily for the entertainment industry.  During those years, Crews returned to graduate school and he earned his M.L.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA's School of Library and Information Science.

    His principal research interest has been the relationship of copyright law to the needs of higher education.  His book, Copyright, Fair Use, and the Challenge for Universities:  Promoting the Progress of Higher Education, was published by the University of Chicago Press in October 1993, and it reevaluates understandings of copyright in the context of teaching and research at the university.  Professor Crews is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world and at colleges and universities across the country, whenever copyright and fair use are critical issues.

    Crews brings a wide range of experience to the task.  He has been a faculty member in three disciplines:  law, business, and library and information science.  His publications encompass the fields of copyright, constitutional law, political history, and library science.  He has worked in a university archives and conducted historical research on windmills and tide mills on Long Island, NY for the National Park Service.  In rare moments of recreation Crews enjoys bicycling, hiking, astronomy, archeology, art, and early rock and roll. My philosophy about a hobby is the same as about copyright:  If I cannot reveal that it is intriguing, fun, relevant, and filled with surprises, I am not doing my job.

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Dr. Stephen C. Ehrmann, The Teaching, Learning and Technology Affiliate of the American Association for Higher Education

    Stephen C. Ehrmann serves as Vice President of The TLT Group, the Teaching, Learning and Technology Affiliate of the American Association for Higher Education and as Director of the Flashlight Project.  Flashlight develops and applies reserarch tools for studying local uses of technology in education.  Dr. Ehrmann also helps lead the TLT Group's efforts to support the growing number of local Teaching, Learning and Technology Roundtables in educational institutions around the world.  He is an expert in a variety of areas including innovation in education, evaluation of the role of technology in education, distance and distributed learning, and the development and viability of computer courseware.

    A prolific author and speaker, Steve Ehrmann's newest book, Adult Learning in a New Technological Era, analyzes recent progress in the use of technology to support postsecondary education in many countries, and suggests policy options for decisionmakers.  He has authored or co-authored four books and over thirty articles that have appared in publications such as Change Magazine, Assessment Update, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Educom Review, Metropolitan University, Liberal Education, Machine Mediated Learning, On the Horizon, and the American Journal of Distance Education.  Dr. Ehrmann has been a member of several panels and commissions, including, most recently, the national Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Committee on Information Technology.

    For eleven years (1985-96) Dr. Ehrmann served as the Senior Program Officer for Interactive Technologies with the Annenberg/CPB Projects at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington DC.  Dr. Ehrmann helped support pioneering work in networking, educational restructuring, multimedia, faculty development, and evaluation of technology.  From 1991-94, Dr. Ehrmann also served as senior program officer with the Annenberg/CPB Mth and Science Project, an initiative dedicated to improving the teaching of math and science in the public schools.

    From 1978-85, he was a program officer with the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE).  Prior to that, he served as Director of Educational Research and Assistance at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

    His Ph.D. is in management and higher education from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also received bachelor's degrees in aerospace engineering and in urban planning. Steve Ehrmann lives in Silver Spring, Maryland with his wife, Leslie Ehrmann, and their 17 year old son, Chris.

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William H. Graves, COLLEGIS Research Institute

    Dr. William H. Graves is President of the COLLEGIS Research Institute.  In addition, he is Senior Vice President of COLLEGIS and a member of the COLLEGIS Board of Directors.  He is responsible for the learning technology services that are based on the InstituteÕs R&D work and offered by COLLEGIS to its client institutions.  These faculty professional development services and related instructional technology support services help colleges and universities incorporate online learning resources and communication tools into their instructional programs.

    Dr. Graves and his colleagues come to the COLLEGIS Research Institute from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Institute for Academic Technology.  Graves has been on the UNC Faculty since 1967 (with a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Indiana University).  He is on leave today after serving as senior information technology officer for eight years, founding the IAT, and also serving in a variety of other academic administrative positions.

    Dr. Graves has been a member of the Board of Directors of CAUSE and is now a member of the transition board steering the consolidation of CAUSE and Educom.  He chairs the planning committee for EducomÕs National Learning Infrastructure Initiative and also serves on the steering committees for the Instructional Management Systems Cooperative, the ARL/CAUSE/Educom Coalition for Networked Information, and the Educom Neworking and Telecommunications Task Force.  He served on the steering committee for the Internet2 Project to help initiate the project and organize the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development to carry forward the Internet2 agenda and subsequent efforts to advance the Internet to meet higher education's needs.

    Dr Graves has served in a consulting capacity for many institutions as they chart a role for information technology services in shaping their future.  He is an accomplished public speaker on that theme and has delivered over 350 invited presentations on campuses and at conferences during the past 15 years.  Dr. Graves has published over 40 articles on all aspects of information technology in higher education. He is a frequent contributor to CAUSE/EFFECT and the Educom Review.  Some of his recent publications are accessible online from the staff section of the Web site www.collegis.org.

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Bruce H. Leland, Western Illinois University

    Bruce Leland is Professor of English at Western Illinois University, teaching first-year writing, composition theory, pedagogy, and computers and writing.  He served for 13 years as director of the Writing Program and helped to create the Writing in the Disciplines program at Western.  He has included internet components in all of his courses for the past five years, and links to the web sites for his courses are available at http://www.wiu.edu/users/mfbhl/.

    He acts as technology consultant for the English department, present Faculty Development workshops in web authoring and HTML, and serves on the college Technology Committee.  Professor Leland is a regular presenter at the annual computers and Writing Conference, as well as other state and national conferences.

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Barbara J. O'Keefe, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

    Barbara J. O'Keefe is a Professor in the Department of Speech Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  She was awarded her A. B. (1971), A.M. (1973), and Ph.D. (1976) in Speech Communication from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  Prior to joining the UIUC faculty, she was an assistant professor at Wayne State University (1975-1979) and at Pennsylvania State University (1979-1980).  Her research program has produced over 50 technical publications, including 20 authored or edited books or chapters, 20 articles or reviews in archive journals, and 6 chapters in refereed conference proceedings.  She hold additional  appointments in the UIUC Department of Mechanical and Inductrial Engineering, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and as Director of the Advanced Information Technologies Laboratory in the UIUC Library.

    Her current research is focused on the development of an integrated strategy for design and deployment of information technology in organizations (the TEAM methodology) bsed on detailed observation of and testing by the target user community.  The TEAM methodology is currently being applied in a multi-year project, Project CITY, funded by the National Science Foundation.  The goal of Project CITY is to create a sustainable information environment to support civil infrastructure maintenance; it involves the design and deployment of a workbench of collaboration and decision support tools for maintenance activities in the Directorate of Public Works at Fort Gordon.

    She is also involved in development and assessment of new tools and strategies to support learning, especially learning based on discovery and collaboration.  This work is being conducted within the framework of the Electronic Quad project, which is developing a technical and organizational infrastructure to support distributed teaching and learning at six leading U.S. universitities.

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Dr. Keith R. Sanders, Illinois Board of Higher Education

    Dr. Keith R. Sanders was appointed Executive Director of the Board of Higher Education effective January 1, 1998.  Dr. Sanders is a native of Benton, Illinois.  He holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in Speech and Psychology.  He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in Communication.  Political communication is his academic specialty and the topic of five books and numerous articles in professional journals.

    Dr. Sanders was most recently the Senior Vice President for Administration and Chief Operating Officer for the University of Wisconsin System in Madison, Wisconsin; Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; and lecturer in Educational Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

    Dr. Sanders served as Dean and Professor of the College of Communication and Fine Arts at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale from 1983 to 1989.  He left Illinois to become Chancellor and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Dr. Sanders and his wife, Carol, are the parents of a son, Mark.


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