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 recently co-edited a volume with Joyce Canaan titled Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University 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 PI on The Math Forum's Virtual Fieldwork Sequence a three-year NSF project at the Math Forum that is investigating the potential of this online educational community to affect the culture of math education for preservice teachers. 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 with Ann Renninger of Building Virtual Communities: Learning and Change in Cyberspace, published by Cambridge University Press.