Mike Caulfield is a research scientist at University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
Before that he was employed by Keene State College as an instructional designer, and by MIT as director of community outreach for the OpenCourseWare Consortium.
He has worked in educational technology since 1997, with some forays into other things to pay the mortgage. Among projects from the late paleolithic were the Persona Project, an attempt to integrate English Composition classes with the creation and maintenance of a student-produced online encyclopedia (1997); Transcript Media, a site which made public domain educational material available to P-12 educators (1997-2000); GameGoo, some of the first commercially produced Flash-based educational games on the internet (1999); Columbia Online, a simulation-based online curriculum for Columbia University (2000-2003, as part of Cognitive Arts), and various e-learning projects for Fortune 500 companies.
Since 2005 he has focused his energy on understanding how online communities and open resources can make institutions more effective, most prominently as the first director of community outreach for the OpenCourseWare Consortium, but also as a founder of a number of local and hyperlocal online communities, and in numerous instructional design projects at Keene State College. He has been recognized for his thinking on these issues, both at national conferences and through Hapgood, his long running blog on educational technology issues (hapgood.us).
Outside of education, he is possibly best known as a co-founder of the 5,000 member online political community Blue Hampshire in 2006, a site described by Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas as “one of the most influential blogs in the nation”, and one of eight blog communities chosen in 2007-2008 for syndication by Newsweek’s Ruckus Project.
His lo-fi electro song “Miss McGinty’s Ghost” reached #26 on the Latvian Radio airplay charts in May 2011. He still has no idea why.
