Biography: Andy Carvin

Andy Carvin (http://www.andycarvin.com) is senior product manager for online communities at National Public Radio (http://www.npr.org). He's the founding editor of the Digital Divide Network (http://www.digitaldivide.net), an online community of more than 10,000 educators, community activists, policymakers and business leaders in over 140 countries working to find solutions to the digital divide. Andy is also author of the PBS blog learning.now (http://www.pbs.org/learningnow), which focuses on the impact of Internet culture on education.

Andy is the creator of the pioneering online education resource EdWeb: Exploring Technology and School Reform (http://www.edwebproject.org), launched in 1994. Named by NetGuide magazine as "One of the Top 50 Places to Go Online," EdWeb was one of the first websites to the impact of telecom policy reform on education. Andy is the founder and moderator of WWWEDU, the Internet's oldest and largest email forum on the role of the Web in education, and DIGITALDIVIDE, the Internet's premiere discussion group for examining policies and practices promoting digital opportunity.

Andy has spent much of the last several years involved in the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), held in 2003 and 2005. He served as the chairman of the WSIS Telecentre Caucus, a multi-stakeholder alliance of policymakers and digital media activists advocating policies for sustainable public technology centers. This work culminated in the publishing of the new book, From the Ground Up: Evolution of the Telecentre Movement, (http://www.andycarvin.com/from-t he-ground-up.pdf) co-authored and edited by Andy.

Andy has been featured in numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, CNN, BBC Radio, Harvard Educational Review, Education Week, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Wired and San Jose Mercury News. Before launching the Digital Divide Network at the Benton Foundation, Andy served as New Media Program Officer for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where he developed some of the first Internet-related grant programs for the public broadcasting community.

In January 2005, Andy proposed a new technique for creating podcasts. The concept, mobcasting, gives groups of people the ability to record podcasts on their mobile phones and publish them on the same website. Using free online tools such as Blogger and Audioblogger, Andy set up a mobcast for Christo's February 2005 art installation in New York. Andy's website, The Gates at Central Park (http://nycgates.blogspot.com) allowed visitors to Central Park to call a phone number and post their own art commentaries over the Internet. A similar website by Andy, Katrina Aftermath (http://katrina05.blogspot.com), allowed anyone to upload breaking news about Hurricane Katrina, including photos and missing person information, to a community blog. For Andy's work on mobcasting and the digital divide, MIT Technology Review magazine named him to their 2005 TR35 list, an annual list of 35 of the world's leading high-tech innovators under the age of 35.

In December 2001, Andy was named by District Administration magazine as one of America's top 25 edtech advocates. Andy received similar honors from eSchoolNews in 1999 when they named him a member of its Impact 30 list of edtech leaders. He is a former member of the board of the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), which advocates policies advancing the role of information technology in schools. From 1999 to 2001, he served on the Board of Directors for the Asia/Pacific Center for Justice and Peace, a consortium of NGOs that promotes democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of religion across Asia.

Andy holds a bachelor of science in rhetoric and a master of arts in telecommunications policy from Northwestern University, where he received the prestigious Annenberg/Washington postgraduate policy fellowship. While living in Illinois, he was co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Chicago-area arts weekly, Art+Performance. Andy has traveled extensively around the world and has written about his adventures in popular online travelogues. He has published extensively through his blog, Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth (http://www.andycarvin.com), where he has produced more than 120 podcasts and video blogs from nearly 20 countries. He also serves as a field correspondent to the hit video blog, Rocketboom (http://www.rocketboom.com). In 2002, he completed co-producing the independent documentary Thai Boxing: A Fighting Chance, which has aired in more than 140 countries on the National Geographic Channel.