2011 Speakers

Enrique Gabriel Legaspi
Teacher
Hollenbeck Middle School
@enriqueglegaspi

BIF Talk: Create and Curate - Mindful Learning for the 21st Century

Enrique Gabriel Legaspi is a teacher with a 13 year track record in education; an educational consultant for many organizations and superstars like will.i.am of the black eyed peas; a teacher-partner with AEG worldwide; and a force in the community of Boyle Heights. Legaspi truly understands how new technologies can be applied in the classroom to build new models for education. He focuses on leadership and technology for engaging students to transform their college-readiness and performance in academic excellence.

Barbara Chow
Education Program Director
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

BIF Talk: Policy as Opportunity - Your Best and Worst Friend

Barbara Chow began her term as the education program director with the Hewlett Foundation in the fall of 2008, coming from the House Budget Committee where she served as policy director.  From 2001-2007 she was the executive director of the National Geographic Education Foundation and vice president for education and children’s programs at National Geographic. Barbara served in both terms of the Clinton administration.

Brewster Kahle
Founder and Digital Librarian
Internet Archive

BIF Talk: Custom Schooling - Affordable One-to-One Education

Brewster Kahle, a computer engineer, internet entrepreneur, and digital librarian, founded the Internet Archive in 1996. He is focused on providing universal access to all knowledge, and developing technologies for information discovery and digital libraries. He was co-founder of Alexa Internet, which helped catalog the Web, which was later sold to Amazon.com. In 1989, Kahle invented the Internet's first publishing system, WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) system and in 1989, founded WAIS Inc., a pioneering electronic publishing company, and was later acquired by America Online. Kahle, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a key supporter of the Open Content Alliance.

Kaycee Eckhardt
Reading Teacher
New Orleans Charter Science and Math Academy

BIF Talk: The Path to College - Literacy in a FEMA Trailer

Kaycee Eckhardt taught in Japan for four years before being inspired by Hurricane Katrina to return to her Louisiana home. She taught for a year before joining the founding staff of Sci Academy, which for the past three years has been first in the district in state testing, while maintaining an open-enrollment, free-tuition policy.She has been teaching freshman reading for the past three years and scholars leave her classroom averaging nearly three years of reading growth.She was named Louisiana Charter School Association Teacher of the Year in 2008-2009.

Mark Milliron
Chancellor
Western Governors University Texas 

BIF Talk: Students' Right to Know - The Case for Radical Immediate Feedback

Dr. Mark David Milliron was recently named Chancellor of Western Governors University Texas, the nonprofit online university founded by the state of Texas. Prior to taking this position, he served as the Deputy Director for Postsecondary Improvement with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, leading efforts to increase student success in the US postsecondary education sector. He is an award-winning leader, author, speaker, and consultant well known for exploring leadership development, future trends, learning strategies, and the human side of technology change.

AnnMarie Polsenberg Thomas
Assistant Professor of Engineering
University of St Thomas
@amptMN
BIF Talk: Serious Play-Dough - Inspiring Young Circuit Designers

AnnMarie’s teaching and research looks at the playful side of engineering and education (with topics such as squishy circuits, the science/engineering of circus, and toy design). She co-founded her university’s Center for Pre-Collegiate Engineering Education, and runs an engineering education program for pre-service and in-service P-12 educators. She is passionate about hands-on, project based learning and giving kids the tools to bring their ideas to tangible form.

Nasser Paydar
Chancellor
Indiana University East
@paydar

BIF Talk: For Hire - Entrepreneurs at the Precipice of Higher Education

Dr. Nasser Paydar joined Indiana University in 1985 as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. From 1989 to 2003, Paydar served the School of Engineering and Technology as Chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Associate Dean for Graduate Programs, Associate Dean for Academic Programs, and Executive Associate Dean. In Spring 2004, Paydar became Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Indiana University ­Purdue University Columbus campus. In 2007, Paydar was appointed as the Interim Chancellor of Indiana University East. He became Chancellor of Indiana University East in 2009.

Danny Hillis
Chairman and Co-founder
Applied Minds

BIF Talk: Personalized Learning: What Is Most Interesting and What Do You Know?

Danny Hillis is Chairman and Co-founder of Applied Minds, LLC. Previously, Hillis was Vice President and Disney Fellow, Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, and a Co-founder of Thinking Machines Corp. Hillis is an inventor, scientist, author and engineer. While completing his doctorate at MIT, he pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He holds over 150 U.S. patents, and is the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock.

Georgette Yakman
Founder
STEAM Education 

BIF Talk: STEAM - Learning that is Representative of the Whole World

While working on advanced certificates from VA Tech in Integrated STEM Education, she developed an educational framework called STEAM. She taught STEAM at a disadvantaged rural high school where she started a nationally winning engineering team her first year. She is the immediate-past president of her state division of teachers. This year she co-launched a movement in Korea to use STEAM nationally as an innovative way to teach K-12.

Martha Kanter
Under Secretary
U.S. Department of Education

BIF Talk: Education and Innovation for Democracy's Future

Martha J. Kanter serves as the Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. Kanter reports to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and oversees policies, programs, and activities related to postsecondary education, adult and career-technical education, federal student aid, and five White House Initiatives on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Educational Excellence for Hispanics, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Gerald Richards
Chief Executive Officer
826 National
@826National

BIF Talk:Writing by Design, Social Entreprenuership by Circumstance

Gerald Richards is the CEO of 826 National. With close to twenty years of leadership experience at national nonprofit organizations, including the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) and the United Negro College Fund, Gerald is a respected advocate for youth and education access. He was a 2008 award recipient of 101 African-American Champions for Youth in the Bay Area and is a frequent speaker on topics of youth literacy, arts education, college access and social entrepreneurship.

Neeru Khosla
Co-Founder and Executive Director
CK-12 Foundation
@nkhosla

BIF Talk:The Interactive Effect - When the Tool and User Go Hand in Hand

Neeru Khosla is currently the Co-Founder and Executive Director of CK-12 Foundation, a non-profit organization, which aims to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide. Khosla currently serves as a member on several advisory boards, including The Nueva School’s Board of Trustees, the Board of Directors for High Tech High School’s Graduate School of Education, the Advisory Board for the Wikimedia Foundation, the Advisory Board for DonorsChoose, and the Advisory Board for Stanford University’s School of Education.

Lee LeFever
Founder and Principal
Common Craft
@leelefever

BIF Talk:Viral to Valuable - How Common Craft is Making Video Explanations a Product

Lee LeFever is the founder and principal of Common Craft, producers of the popular series of paper-and-whiteboard video explanations. Since 2007 Common Craft's videos have been viewed over 35 million times online and have inspired teachers to work with students on their own “Common Craft Style” video projects. Common Craft now operates a video subscription service that helps teachers and trainers around the world shine in classrooms and on the Web.

Adora Svitak
Teacher and Student
@adorasv

BIF Talk:Little House on the Prairie Redux

Since age 7, Adora Svitak has been drumming up excitement about reading and writing, and education technology. Now 13, Adora has authored three books and taught over 400 schools and classrooms worldwide, via video conferencing and in-person visits. In February 2011, she received the NEA Foundation’s Award for Outstanding Service to Public Education, an honor previously bestowed on luminaries like Bill Clinton and Jane Goodall.

William Ayers
Distinguished Professor of Education
University of Illinois at Chicago

BIF Talk: Diving into the Wreckage - Big Ideas in Baby Steps

Bill Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), founder of both the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, has written extensively about social justice, democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise.

Gregory M. Anderson
Dean
Morgridge College of Education, University of Denver

BIF Talk: Higher Education - Adapt or Die

Gregory M. Anderson is the Dean of the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver and a tenured Associate Professor in Education. Before coming to DU in 2009, Anderson was an Associate Professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, Program in Higher and Postsecondary Education. In 2006, Anderson was granted an extended leave from Teachers College to become the higher education policy program officer for the Ford Foundation in New York.

Jade Trinh
Community Manager
Founder School

BIF Talk: From Student to Student - Risk, Aversion and the Role of Integration

Jade Trinh is the Community Manager at FounderSchool, a non-profit incubator started at Cal. Trinh graduated with a B.S. in Business Administration from the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.  After taking a mobile applications class, she and her team created a note-making app using optical character recognition. Together, they won the University Mobile Challenge at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year.  She has now joined Google's AdSense team.

Jody Lewen
Executive Director
Prison University Project

BIF Talk: Learning and Trust on the Road to College Readiness at San Quentin

The central project of PUP is the College Program at San Quentin, which provides a rigorous Associate of Arts degree program in liberal arts, as well as an expansive college preparatory program in math and English, to over 300 students. This privately-funded project is the only on-site, degree-granting college program in the entire California State Prison system, and one of the few in the nation. The Prison University Project is committed to facilitating access and success in higher education for students with diverse social, cultural, and economic backgrounds; levels of academic preparedness; learning styles; and mental health status.