Roger B. Blumberg
rbb@cs.brown.edu
Box
1910, Computer Science Department
Brown
University
Providence,
RI 02912
I am an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department, where I've been teaching and writing about educational technology, computers ethics, big data & society, and other topics in the philosophy of technology, since 1998. In Spring 2018, I'll be teaching two Data Science Initiative (DSI) courses: Data, Ethics and Society (DATA 0080), and a Masters seminar, Data & Society (DATA 2080).
From 1998-2006, I taught CS92, The Educational Software Seminar as well as one of the inaugural First Year Seminars at Brown, Computers and Human Values (CS009). Since 1999, I also have been an occasional member of the History, Philosophy and Social Science (HPSS) faculty at The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where my courses have included Science and Society in 20th Century America, Technology and Contemporary Life, and Computing and Its Consequences. At the start of 2012, I was made an alternate member of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Brown, because of my work in the philosophy of technology and my evaluation experience.
Before coming to the Computer Science Department, I was a Visiting Scholar at Brown's Institute for Brain and Neural Systems (IBNS), working on the analysis and implementation of biologically-inspired learning algorithms. After creating MendelWeb, in 1995, I became Senior Hypermedia Researcher at Brown's Scholarly Technology Group. At STG I worked on a variety of educational technology projects, and hosted the 1996 Conference on Hypermedia, Teaching and Technology, as part of Brown's participation in the US Department of Education's RTEC for the Northeast, NetTech.
I'm a graduate of Columbia College, where I majored in English and Comparative Literature, and was a high school English teacher in New York City before accepting a full-time Associate in Science position at Columbia in 1986. At Columbia, I taught the general education science course, Theory and Practice of Science, from 1984-1989, as well as a core curriculum Humanities course for first-year students, and a science theory course for the Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP) at Columbia. In addition to my teaching undergraduates at Columbia, Eugene Lang College, Brown and RISD, I authored and taught (for 15 consecutive summers) a mathematics course, in the Columbia Summer Program for High School Students.
I have published articles in a diverse (and probably rather peculiar) group of journals and magazines, in print and online, from The Sciences and the now defunkt New York Newsday, to The Brown Teaching Exchange and Louisiana Educational Technology Review. Most recently, I have become a contributor to Mendele's Blog.
