Learning Resource Metadata Initiative

LRMI’s Technical Working Group Members:

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  Sheryl Abshire
  Calcasieu Parish Public School System
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• Sheryl Abshire is the Chief Technology Officer for the Calcasieu Parish School System in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and is Assistant professor at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. She has been involved in diverse staff development programs throughout the United States and Great Britain, which involved restructuring schools through the infusion of technology and curriculum enhancements. Considered a leader in technology integration, she serves as the catalyst to initiate the integration of technology into all curriculum areas throughout her school district, the state, and internationally.

  Abshire has served in an educational capacity for 38 years. Prior to joining Calcasieu Parish School System, she worked as a school principal, K-5 teacher, library/media specialist, and adjunct professor at McNeese State University and Louisiana Tech University.

  Her distinguished accolades include being 1991 NEA/NFIE Christa McAuliffe Fellow, 1990 Louisiana Technology Teacher of the Year, 1992 National Teacher Hall of Fame Inductee, 1998 Louisiana Computer Using Educator of the Year, 1999 McNeese State University Distinguished Alumnus, 2002 National Christa McAuliffe Award winner and the 2008 University of New Orleans Outstanding Doctoral Student in Educational Leadership, and a nationally recognized consultant/speaker. In May of 2009, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) awarded Abshire the first Public Policy Advocate of the Year Award for her work promoting educational technology. Abshire serves on the ISTE Standards and Accreditation Committee.

  She holds a Bachelor’s of Science in early childhood education, a Master’s of Education in elementary education, is an educational specialist in school administration and supervision, and holds a Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of New Orleans in educational leadership and administration.

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  Phil Barker
  JISC CETIS
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• JISC CETIS, The Center for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards, provides advice to the UK higher and post-16 education sectors on educational technology and standards. Barker currently serves as the learning technology advisor. Barker’s main areas of work have been resource description and discovery, repositories and resource management, and open educational resources (OERs). His personal interests have led to work within higher education focused on the evaluation of computer-based resources for engineering and physical science education.

  Barker’s vast experience in OERs has included work on the Delores OER project, which builds collections of OERs for engineering design to incorporate into the Bayesian feed filtering project. He served as an associate of the HE Academy Engineering Subject Centre and contributed to their OER pilot project, as well as to the Materials Subject Centre’s CORE Materials OER project. More projects include Reset and LearnEM, each relating to the promotion of the sharing of learning resources for engineering, and the Learning Materials Application Profile Scoping Study relating to metadata for learning resources.

  He studied at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom before obtaining a Doctorate of Philosophy and completing three years of research in the area of polymer crystallization.

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  Dan Brickley
  VU University Amsterdam
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• Brickley, a Web-TV researcher, co-chairs the Semantic Web interest group and the newly-formed Social Web incubator group at VU University Amsterdam. His main focus is open standards, open source, and open content on the Web.

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  Brian Carver
  UC Berkeley School of Information
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• At UC Berkeley School of Information, Brian Carver’s primary research focus has been the laws and policies governing technology and information, with particular interest in understanding the technical, economic, social, and legal frameworks that best promote progress and access to information. The collaborative forms of creativity enabled or enhanced through computer networks and the ways in which law or other factors facilitate or frustrate creativity and innovation have been paramount for Carver as an educator. His most current research focuses on copyright law, open source and free software, technology and innovation policy, and the regulation of the Internet.

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  Cable Green
  Creative Commons
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• As Director of Global Learning, Green leads the education projects at Creative Commons. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms. Cable is an advocate for open policies that ensure access to publicly-funded education materials. He mixes digital technologies, open licensing, standards, and policies to significantly improve access to quality, affordable, open educational resources.

  Previously, he served as Director of eLearning & Open Education for the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges. There he led a project to build and share highest-enrolled courses under a Creative Commons Attribution license, known as the “Open Course Library.” In addition, he served as the Director of Technology for the Ohio Learning Network and Director of Educational Technology for the Ohio State University College of Pharmacy where he built Ohio State’s first online doctoral program.

  He holds a Doctorate of Philosophy in educational technology from Ohio State University, a Master of Art in communication from Ohio State University, an MPC from Westminster College, and a Bachelor’s of Science in international affairs from Lewis and Clark College.

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  Greg Grossmeier
  Creative Commons (Co-Chair)
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• Grossmeier has served as the Education Technology and Policy Coordinator at Creative Commons since July 2011. He focuses on how Open Education projects can better create, disseminate, and reuse educational materials.

  Prior to joining Creative Commons, Grossmeier served as a Copyright Specialist at the University of Michigan Library. He has also worked with Open.Michigan, an initiative related to open sharing of academic research, outreach, and policy.

  He holds a Master’s of Science in Information Policy and Library and Information Services from the University of Michigan.

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  Charlie Jiang
  Microsoft
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• As Principal Architect for Microsoft’s Online Services division, Charlie Jiang works with the Bing Core Search Team to develop open-ecosystem search platforms.

  Prior to joining Microsoft’s Online Services division, Jiang served as the Chief Architect of the Mobile Group and Open Application Platform Group at Yahoo Inc. He was also a Senior Engineering Scientist at IBM and an Assistant Professor at Wayne State University.

  Charlie Jiang has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Wayne State University and a Bachelor’s of Engineering in Computer Engineering from Tsinghua University. He received executive education at the Harvard Business School.

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  Michael Johnson
  Full Potential Associates
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• Since 1985, Johnson has been designing, developing, and delivering technology solutions for government entities, publishing companies, universities, public and school libraries, and classrooms of all types. In 2008, Johnson founded Full Potential Associates, which is a consultancy focused on the strategic and technical issues facing the publishing and education world.

  His career spans small technology companies such as The Library Corporation all the way up to large multinational distribution companies such as Follett Corporation.

  In 2000, while at Follett, Johnson started his involvement in strategy at the broader group and corporate levels. This strategy work went well beyond products and existing markets to involve things such as corporate strategy and mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

  In 2005, Johnson founded the Follett Digital Resources business unit within Follett Corporation. In addition to running that business unit, he was a member of Follett’s Senior Leadership Group and Follett’s IT Leadership Council. Johnson’s operation was the group charged with driving Follett Corporation’s digital strategy.

  Johnson was involved in a series of M&A activities during his time at Follett, with two of the projects (ICI and Fourteen40) being directly acquired by Follett Digital Resources.

  Johnson has been involved in a wide variety of industry committees, sub-committees, and work groups. He is a frequent panelist, moderator, and speaker on strategic and technical topics across the country and abroad.

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  Mike Linksvayer
  Creative Commons (Co-Chair)
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• Linksvayer joined Creative Commons as Chief Technology Officer in 2003 and became Vice President in April 2007. Previously he co-founded Bitzi, an early open content/open data service.

  Before founding Bitzi, Linksvayer developed the framework for Internet billing applications at Avolent. As a web engineer and consultant, Mike has led the development of dozens of web applications and worked on early broadband content projects at two multimedia startups.

  He holds a Bachelor’s of Art in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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  Joshua Marks
  Curriki
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• Mr. Marks heads technology development and operations for Curriki, the leading K-12 non-profit global community for teachers, students, and parents to create, share, and find open learning resources. In this role he sets the technical direction, manages the development teams, and collaborates with partners, contributors, and the open source software community to design and provide the tools needed to realize Curriki’s innovative vision of open access and teacher and student empowerment.

  Prior to Curriki, Joshua served as Senior System Architect at CTB/McGraw-Hill, leading the creation of an enterprise-wide service oriented architecture for assessment development, delivery, analytics, and reporting for high-scale high-stakes tests. Prior to that he served as Director of eLearning technology at Harcourt Education, where, among other projects, he spearheaded the nation’s first one-to-one tablet pilot for K-12 in 2002. Joshua has also participated with numerous educational standards organizations over the years representing Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Curriki.

  The first decade of Mr. Marks’ career was focused on designing and publishing some of the first consumer learning games on personal computers at The Learning Company and Electronic Arts, back when RadioShack still made computers and CD-ROMs were the hot new technology.

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  Brandt Redd
  Gates Foundation
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• Brandt Redd is Senior Technology Officer for Education Programs at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and contributes to foundation efforts in College Readiness and Postsecondary Success.

  Redd has been working with digital media and education for more than 25 years. He co-founded Folio Corporation and Agilix Labs. Between those efforts, he served as Chief Scientist at Ancestry.com.

  Redd has a BS in Computer Science and an MBA, both from Brigham Young University. He is co-inventor of three patents and multiple patents pending. In a diverse career, he has served as a software engineer, project manager, DBA, chief scientist, and CTO. He has invented search algorithms, architected security and permissions infrastructure, built and broken DRM, and reverse-engineered data formats and software algorithms.

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  Colin Smythe
  IMS Global
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• IMS Global Learning Consortium advances technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. To further this mission, the IMS community develops open interoperability standards, supports and encourages adoption of technical services, through programs that highlight effective practices. Smythe has been consulting for IMS Global since 1999. In his role as chief architect, he is responsible for managing the development and maintenance of the full suite of IMS specifications.

  For 25 years Symthe has worked in both the academic and the industrial world. Prior to IMS Global, he was a lecturer at the Universities of Durham and Surrey, worked for several years at Logica Ltd., was the founder and managing director of the systems consultancy Hyperion Systems Ltd, and is currently a Director and Principal Consultant at Dunelm Services Limited. He served as a member of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, UK where he was Head of Department and Chair of Computer Science from 1992-1999. During the last seven years, he has worked on a number of public and private sector e-learning projects.

  In 1999, Smythe was made a Fellow of the British Computer Society and became a Chartered Engineer.

  He holds a degree in Applied Physics and a Doctorate of Philosophy with a research focus on spread spectrum local area networks. Both degrees were obtained at University Durham in the United Kingdom.

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  Stuart Sutton
  Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
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• As Managing Director and CEO of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, Sutton’s research areas include metadata and networked information discovery and retrieval, technology-mediated teaching and learning, cognition and the information-seeking behavior of discourse communities, mental models in information system design, and the law and policy of intellectual property. Currently, he teaches in the areas of information law and policy, legal informatics, and the organization of information. Sutton is an associate professor emeritus with the Information School of the University of Washington, Seattle. He has served on the faculties of Syracuse University and San Jose State University and in a visiting position at the University of California at Berkeley.

  Sutton received his Master’s and Doctorate of Philosophy degrees from the University of California at Berkeley School of Library and Information Studies. He received his Juris Doctorate from Golden Gate University School of Law and his Master’s of Law in Copyright from the University of California at Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law. He holds Bachelor’s of Art and Master’s of Art degrees in Theatre Arts from San Francisco State University.

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  Randy Wilhelm
  netTrekker
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• Randy Wilhelm passionately believes that students must be the ultimate and natural focus of education and learning. A driven leader creating dialogue, opportunity, and innovation in education, Wilhelm is the CEO and co-founder of netTrekker, a leader in the delivery of digital K-12 educational content.

  The company’s flagship product, netTrekker Search, pioneered educational search tools in K-12 schools by delivering safe, relevant, educator-reviewed digital resources and personalized learning tools to support students’ individual learning needs. With netTrekker Search, Wilhelm led the industry to change how digital curriculum is tagged, sorted, and delivered to all stakeholders in K-12 education.

  Prior to netTrekker, Wilhelm was an Executive Vice President at USI Midwest (NASDAQ:USIH), where he was a key leader who managed and delivered rapid and sustainable growth at one of the world’s leading insurance brokers.

  He has a degree in economics from DePauw University, and serves on multiple education and youth related not-for-profit boards and committees.

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  Lee Wilson
  PCI Educational Publishing
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• PCI Education offers real-life approaches to teaching basic academic skills and life skills to struggling students, from Special Education to the regular classroom, and from ESL to Adult Education. Wilson has completed two terms on the AEP Board of Directors. He has more than 20 years of experience in the K-12 field with expertise in strategy, products, marketing, and sales issues for technology and print publishers.

  Prior to joining PCI Education, Wilson operated Headway Strategies, a Texas-based management consulting firm focused on the education industry. He has also served as Vice President, Marketing and Chief Marketing Officer at Harcourt Achieve; Regional Vice President of Pearson Learning Group; and General Manager of K12Planet.com at Chancery Software. In his seven years at Apple Computer, Wilson held a variety of positions, including Business Development Manager and K-12 Enterprise Solutions Marketing Specialist.

  He has an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s Degree in History and Political Science from Princeton University.