Andy Carvin

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Andy Carvin

Andy Carvin is National Public Radio's senior product manager for online communities. Carvin was the founding editor and former coordinator of the Digital Divide Network, an online community of more than 10,000 Internet activists in over 140 countries working to bridge the digital divide.^[1] He is also an active blogger as well as a field correspondent to the vlog Rocketboom.

Carvin lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

[edit] Biography

Born in Boston and raised in Florida, Carvin is a graduate of Northwestern University. While working for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1994, he authored the website EdWeb: Exploring Technology & School Reform, one of the first websites to advocate the use of the World-Wide Web in education.^[1] In 1999, he was hired by the Benton Foundation to help develop Helping.org, a philanthropy website that eventually became known as Networkforgood.org. At the December 1999 US National Digital Divide Summit in Washington DC, President Bill Clinton announced the launch of the Digital Divide Network, a spinoff of Helping.org edited by Carvin.^[2]^[3]

In 2001, he organized an email forum called SEPT11INFO, an emergency discussion forum in response to the September 11 attacks. Following the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004, he created the RSS aggregator Tsunami-Info.org, and served as a contributor to the TsunamiHelp collaborative blog.

In January 2005, Carvin began advocating mobile phone podcasting as a tool for citizen journalism and human rights monitoring; he called the concept mobcasting. Utilizing free online tools including FeedBurner, Blogger and Audioblogger, Carvin demonstrated the potential of mobcasting at a February 2005 Harvard blogging conference and at The Gates, the Central Park art installation created by the artist Christo. He later demonstrated mobcasting as part of a collaborative blog called Katrina Aftermath, which allowed members of the public to post multimedia content regarding Hurricane Katrina. For Carvin's work on mobcasting and the digital divide, Carvin received a 2005 TR35 award from Technology Review, awarded annually to the 35 leading technology innovators under age 35.^[4] Carvin has also been honored as one of the top education technology advocates in eSchool News magazine and District Administration magazine.^[5]

In May 2006, Carvin began serving as host on a blog called learning.now on PBS. According to Learning.now's website, it explores "how new technology and Internet culture affect how educators teach and children learn. It will offer a continuing look at how new technology such as wikis, blogs, vlogs, RSS, podcasts, social networking sites, and the always-on culture of the Internet are impacting teacher and students' lives both inside and out of the classroom." Learning.now is part of PBS TeacherSource, PBS' educator website.

In September, 2006, Andy Carvin joined National Public Radio as their senior product manager for online communities. Since his arrival at NPR, he has been working to develop a new online strategy for the organization, including citizen journalism, social networking and user-generated content.