User:Bruce Caron

Bruce is the founder and current executive director of the New Media Studio and the New Media Research Institute in Santa Barbara. Bruce was trained as a social anthropologist and an urban cultural geographer. He is skilled in a variety of multimedia authoring tools, and completed the first multimedia dissertation at UC Santa Barbara. Through the New Media Studio and the New Media Research Institute, he is realizing the goal of bringing new tools and skills to the public to help democratize the technological advantages of the digital revolution. Bruce has a wide-ranging academic background in both quantitative and qualitative methodologies and has been active for several years in issues of digital libraries, the use of multimedia in education, and the theory of digital media. Bruce has taught at colleges and universities in Japan, and at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California and has served as the president of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners, the chair of the DLESE Data Access Working Group, on user working group for SEDAC (Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center) at Columbia University, and as an elected member of the National Science Digital Library Policy Committee. He helped create a public awareness action in Santa Barbara, lightblueline.org, which proposes to paint the seven-meter elevation contour on that city’s streets, to mark the vulnerability the community faces due to human induced climate change. In 2010 he was awarded the Martha Maiden Lifetime Achievement Award from the ESIP Federation. He recently finished a novel, Junana, which outlines an alternative present, where the promise of educational gaming turns the world on its head as hundreds of millions of teenagers know more than their parents, teachers, and the marketplace. His work has been supported by the NSF, NASA, NIH, The Paul G. Allan Family Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Google, Inc.