Volume 18. Overview and Autobiographical Essays
This book serves as the interpretive frame and navigational infrastructure for the entire eLibrary collection. Its eighteen chapters span four types of content: autobiographical narrative, reference documents, intellectual self-assessment, and institutional record.
The autobiographical chapters (2–9) present a life that defies easy categorization. The author moved from continental philosophy and labor activism through community development work and software engineering to educational research and retirement in a Cape Cod conservation community. What binds these phases is not a single discipline but a persistent set of concerns: the relationship between theory and practice, the importance of collaboration and community, the role of technology as a mediating artifact in human endeavors. The informal memoir (chapter 4) and the topical essays on union organizing (chapter 5), neighborhood revitalization (chapter 6), house rehabilitation (chapter 7), and retirement activities (chapter 9) read as case studies of the same concerns that animate the formal CSCL research—how people build shared understanding and community through joint activity, with and without computer support.
Chapters 10–13 provide the skeletal chronological record: a timeline running from cosmological prehistory through the author's family genealogy to present-day Chatham, a list of homes and travels, and a log of academic conference appearances. These chapters are reference documents rather than narrative, but they quietly document the global reach of the CSCL community and the degree to which the author's research life was itself a form of international collaborative practice.
Chapters 14–17 constitute the meta-apparatus of the eLibrary: the complete bibliographic index of all volumes and essays, a chronological listing that reveals the intellectual arc from 1967 to 2021, volume summaries for new readers, and extended reflections on rereading the collection as a whole. The reflections (chapter 17) are the intellectual heart of the book, demonstrating that the early philosophical preoccupations with interpretation, social theory, and the nature of knowledge did not merely precede the CSCL work but generated it.
The detailed CV (chapter 18) closes the volume with institutional documentation, providing the formal verification of what the autobiographical chapters render as lived experience.
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Part I: Introduction to My Life and Writings
Chapter 1: Part I: Introduction to My Life and Writings
This brief prefatory chapter frames the entire volume as autobiographical context for the eLibrary collection. It identifies the author's successive intellectual pursuits—mathematics, physics, philosophy, computer science, community development, educational research, and sculpture—as threads running through interconnected careers. It describes the eLibrary's structure: five commercially published books (MIT Press, Springer, Morgan & Claypool, Cambridge University Press) and fourteen self-published collections, all freely available online. The chapter establishes that most writings address computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), centered on the Virtual Math Teams research project at Drexel University and the Math Forum, and that this volume provides the biographical scaffolding for the whole collection.
Intro to My Life
This chapter sketches the major phases of the author's life across six domains: philosophy (from high school reading through a PhD at Northwestern and three years in Germany), computer science (systems programming, a second PhD at Colorado, research and teaching at Drexel), community development (neighborhood revitalization and computerization projects in Philadelphia), educational research (the CSCL and Virtual Math Teams work), retirement activities in Chatham (conservation, sculpture, archaeology), and family life. For each domain, the chapter cross- references the relevant eLibrary volumes, providing a navigational map that connects biographical episodes to specific collections of writings.
Intro to My Research & Writings
This chapter introduces the philosophy of group cognition as the author's central intellectual contribution and distinguishes it from the surrounding field. Post-cognitive socio-cultural theory superseded individual- cognition-centered approaches by the late twentieth century, but its major authors retained either psychological or sociological foci, neglecting the small-group level where collaborative learning actually occurs. The author's approach responds by systematically focusing on the small group as the primary unit of description, collecting data from realistic collaborative sessions, and applying case-study analysis to reveal cognitive processes at the group level. The chapter traces this program across five published books, each advancing and refining the theory.
Catch.Up.Me (2009)
Written in 2009 as an informal memoir prompted by reconnecting with old friends through social media, this chapter traces the author's life from his grandparents' Eastern European Jewish immigrant origins through his own childhood in several American cities, education at MIT, graduate study in Germany, philosophical dissertation, labor organizing, community development work, doctoral study in computer science, academic career, and family life. Organized around lists and photographs rather than narrative prose, it is addressed to people from the author's past and reflects on what it means to compress decades of experience into a readable account for someone who has been absent from one's life.
Union Organizing at Temple (1975-1977)
This chapter documents a labor organizing campaign at Temple University's computer center, where staff unionized to oppose the subcontracting of computer center management to a private company. The author played a central role in the campaign, helping form a chapter of a public employees' union and calling a strike timed to disrupt university registration. When the strike was ended by court injunction and all workers were fired and offered non-union positions at the contractor, the author refused reemployment and pursued an unemployment compensation claim that set a legal precedent in Pennsylvania—establishing that a worker can decline a non-union job offer and still be eligible for benefits.
Community Development in Philadelphia (1978-1985)
This chapter gives a brief institutional history of the Southwest Germantown Community Development Corporation (SGCDC), a neighborhood organization founded in 1976 in response to deindustrialization and housing abandonment in a low-income Philadelphia neighborhood. Under the author's direction as economic development planner, SGCDC grew from a volunteer organization into a multi-program operation offering housing counseling, sweat-equity rehabilitation support, home weatherization, youth employment services, and small business assistance. The chapter describes the community self-help philosophy that guided the organization, the role of federal and foundation funding, and the political challenges of the Reagan era that eventually constrained the organization's work.
Rehabbing My First House (1980-1989)
This chapter consists of a letter written to an aunt in January 1981 after the author purchased a deteriorated Queen Anne-style house in Southwest Germantown for sixteen thousand dollars cash. The letter describes the condition of the house—decades of neglect, failed heating and electrical systems, accumulated debris—and the early stages of rehabilitation, including installation of new systems, workshop setup, and plans for eventually restoring its historical character while incorporating modern interior design. The letter captures the simultaneous pressures of family life, professional responsibilities, and the physical demands of homeownership in a neighborhood undergoing community-driven revitalization.
A Career in Informatics (2009)
Written in 2009, this essay traces the author's path from childhood encounters with early computing—a Brainiac kit, visits to Univac mainframes, the influence of Sputnik—through MIT, philosophy graduate school in Germany, systems programming at two universities, community nonprofit computerization, a PhD in computer science at Colorado, and eventually a faculty career in informatics at Drexel. The essay shows how philosophical training, especially in hermeneutics and social theory, shaped the author's approach to software design, educational research, and the theory of group cognition. It presents the informatics career not as a departure from philosophy but as its continuation in a different medium.
Retirement Activities in Chatham (2014-2021)
This chapter collects newspaper articles, bulletin essays, and other published pieces documenting the author's retirement activities in Chatham, Massachusetts. Topics include: a feature on the author's discovery of sculpture as a primary creative practice in retirement; an essay on the ecological importance and fragility of Chatham's salt marshes, written as chair of the Chatham Conservation Foundation's Salt Marsh Task Force; a report on assessing the environmental impacts of the town's airport; and two accounts of historic coin finds at the archaeological excavation of the Nickerson Homestead. Together these pieces show the author's post-academic engagement with place, environment, history, and art.
My Timeline
This chapter presents a visual and chronological record of the author's life, beginning with the formation of the universe 14 billion years ago and proceeding through the evolution of life, the migration of ancestral populations from Africa through the Levant and into Eastern Europe, the immigration of grandparents to the United States in the early twentieth century, and then year-by-year events of the author's own life: births and deaths in the family, moves between cities, schools attended, jobs held, and travels taken. The chapter also includes portraits painted at different ages and word clouds of the eLibrary volumes, providing visual representations of the author's intellectual and personal history.
Homes Where I Have Lived
This chapter lists every place the author has resided from birth in Wilmington, Delaware in 1945 through retirement in Chatham, Massachusetts. It covers more than thirty locations across Delaware, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Colorado, Germany, and New Jersey—reflecting the mobility of an academic and activist life that crossed national borders and institutional affiliations repeatedly. The chapter includes photographs of the Philadelphia and Chatham homes that bookend the period of the author's adult professional and family life.
Travels Abroad
This chapter is a chronological log of the author's international travel from family trips to Canada and Mexico in the early 1960s through academic conference travel across Europe, Asia, and Latin America in the 2000s and 2010s. The list reflects the global reach of the CSCL research community, with entries for conferences in Norway, Germany, Chile, Taiwan, Greece, Hong Kong, Australia, South Korea, and Sweden, among many others. Personal trips—a Caribbean cruise, visits to Peru and Ecuador, a tour of the Galápagos Islands—are interspersed with the professional travel, documenting the interweaving of research and life.
Academic Conferences and Presentations
This chapter lists all academic conferences at which the author presented work, from the Cognitive Science conference in Boulder in 1993 through a quality of life workshop in Hannover in 2017. The entries span major CSCL, learning sciences, human-computer interaction, and computer- supported cooperative work conferences worldwide, tracking the author's sustained participation in multiple overlapping research communities over a quarter century. The list also documents a clear shift in the geographic center of gravity of the CSCL community, from North American and European venues in the 1990s toward an increasingly global distribution by the 2010s.
E-Library Volumes
This chapter provides the complete bibliographic architecture of the eLibrary: a table listing all nineteen volumes with their file names, titles, date ranges, and page counts, followed by full citation listings for every chapter in every volume. It is the primary navigational resource for the collection, enabling readers to locate any essay by title, author, date, or original publication venue, and to find it within the eLibrary volume structure. The chapter also captures the scope of the author's output: more than two hundred essays spanning from 1967 to 2021, organized into nineteen thematic collections totaling over five thousand pages.
Chronological Listing of Essays with Volume and Chapter
This chapter lists all essays in the eLibrary in chronological order of original publication, from a 1967 essay on Nietzsche through writings from 2021, with each entry cross-referenced to its volume and chapter number. The chronological ordering allows readers to trace the development of the author's thinking across more than five decades—from early continental philosophy through community development writing, software design research, and finally the sustained program of CSCL theory and Virtual Math Teams analysis. Reading the list sequentially reveals how early philosophical concerns with interpretation, social theory, and the nature of knowledge persisted into and shaped the later scientific research.
Summaries of the Volumes
This chapter offers concise summaries of each of the nineteen eLibrary volumes, written as an initial guide through what the author calls "a jungle of words." Each summary situates the volume within the broader trajectory of the author's thinking, describes its contents and organization, and notes the original contexts in which the essays were written. The chapter is addressed to a reader approaching the eLibrary for the first time and needing orientation before committing to any single volume. Together the summaries suggest a coherent intellectual arc from Marxist-Heideggerian philosophy through software design, community theory, and group cognition, ending with sculpture and conservation.
Reflections on the Volumes
This extended chapter collects the author's notes from a systematic rereading of the entire eLibrary in 2016, after completing the first eighteen volumes. The reflections trace connections and continuities across the collection, noting how early philosophical concerns—hermeneutics, social theory, the nature of interpretation, the relationship between individual and collective—resurface transformed in later CSCL work. The chapter also addresses practical questions about format: why printed books and PDFs are superior to Kindle or hypermedia for this kind of scholarly collection. It serves as the closest thing in the volume to a sustained intellectual autobiography, reading the author's own oeuvre as a coherent if nonlinear project.
Part V. Detailed CV
This chapter presents the author's complete academic curriculum vitae as of September 2018, listing education (two PhDs, in philosophy and computer science), professional positions (from mathematics teacher and systems programmer through nonprofit director, postdoctoral fellow, and professor emeritus at Drexel), funded research grants from NSF and other agencies, and approximately 360 publications and presentations spanning books, dissertations, journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, and invited talks. The CV documents the full institutional and bibliographic record of a career that moved across philosophy, software research, community development, and educational technology across more than five decades.