4 TechTrends • July/August 2013 Volume 57, Number 4

Howard Rheingold, ECT 2013 Keynote Presenter

lanning for the 2013 conference in Anaheim continues at a fren-zied pace. By the time you read

this, presenters will have been no-tified and the schedule locked into place. With all the great volunteer help it looks like we will win this race. So I hope you will register soon so we’ll see you in that place. (That’s not a poem, I just talk that way.)

We’ve got some great sessions planned and I will discuss them here over the next few months. We’ve got two special keynote sessions I will tell you about in detail later. The first is a tribute panel to Dave Jonassen featuring authors from the Jonas-sen Festschrift that will be published soon. The second is our own version of a TEDx session given by three of our own illustrious luminaries, Tom Reeves, Ali Carr, and David Wiley. But in this issue I’d like to intro-duce our Thursday keynote presenter, Howard Rheingold.

Howard Rheingold says he “fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension in 1981, then plugged my computer into my tele-phone in 1983 and got sucked into the net.” He has been exploring the intersection of minds and technol-ogy ever since. Credited with invent-

ing the term “virtual community,” he has served as the Editor of The Whole Earth Review and Editor in Chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Cata-log. He was one of the Principle de-signers and the first Executive Edi-tor of HotWired and the founder of Electric Minds and later Brainstorms, trailblazing virtual communities.

Howard is an artist, a critic, a writer and a teacher. He is a Distin-guished Fellow at the Institute for

the Future and teaches courses on virtual communities at Stanford and U.C. Berkeley. A witty, engaging, and always colorful speaker, his TED talk on collaboration, participatory media and collective action has been viewed nearly half a million times. A winner of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digi-tal Media and Learning competition, he gave the 2012 Regent’s Lecture at U.C. Berkeley describing the evolu-tion of his use

2013 AECT Conference Update

Innovate! Integrate! Communicate!By Steve Harmon, Georgia State University

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