I'm a cultural anthropologist at Drexel University my research focuses on higher education, ethnographic evaluation in education, virtual community, the semiotics of mass culture, and the self in relation to contemporary personal and political issues of identity and globalization. My current work in higher education focuses on the spatial transformation of American universities within the consumer spaces of cities and towns. This work looks at the most recent phase of the commodification of the university earlier phases of which I explored in my first book College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodification of Higher Education, Falmer Press, 1997. I am currently co-editing a volume titled Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University to be published by Routledge/Falmer.
Since 1997 I've worked as an ethnographer at the Math Forum, a virtual math education community and resource center. Currently I am co-pi on the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) project, a five-year NSF project at the Math Forum that is investigating the dynamics of online and face-to face collaborative problem solving and problem creation. The project seeks to identify aspect of good collaborative problem solving and then design online systems that will help both students and teachers to create and solve collaborative math problems. I am also co-pi on Leadership Development for Technology Integration: Developing an Effective NSDL Teacher Workshop Model. This project is a three-year NSF project to develop and refine a hybrid workshop model that supports teachers to integrate National Science Digital Library (NSDL) resources and technologies into their classrooms with an immediate goal to directly engage over 1,000 teachers, grades 5-9. I am co-editor of Building Virtual Communities: Learning and Change in Cyberspace, published by Cambridge University Press.