Andy Carvin (http://www.andycarvin.com) is Senior Strategist for National Public Radio’s Social Media Desk. As coordinator of NPR’s social media strategy, he has helped NPR programs learn how to connect the public with NPR’s editorial activities in order to further the quality and diversity of NPR’s journalism. He was recently named by Washingtonian magazine as part of its 2009 list of the 100 leading technology innovators in Washington DC.
Prior to coming to NPR in 2006, Andy was the director and 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.
In 2005, MIT Technology Review magazine named Andy to their 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 education technology advocates. Andy received similar honors from eSchoolNews in 1999 when they named him a member of its Impact 30 list of education technology 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.