Dr. Ted M. Kahn

Ted M. Kahn, Ph.D. is the cofounder, President, and CEO of DesignWorlds for Learning, Inc. and is Chief Creative Learning Officer and Future Careers Coach for DesignWorlds for College & Careers. He is also Senior Fellow of Learning & Creativity at The Tech Museum of Innovation. He was honored in 2003 to be named the first lifetime NMC Fellow of the NMC: New Media Consortium, in recognition of his lifelong contributions to the development and creative use of interactive computing, digital media and the web and telecommunications networks for the advancement of teaching, lifelong learning and creative expression in K-12 and higher education, museums and other informal/recreational learning environments and for corporate and business learning and training.
 
Ted is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar with Media X @ Stanford; CSTS Fellow with the Center for Science, Technology & Society at Santa Clara University and Founding Director of the Bay Area Science Museum Education Collaboratory.
 
He has been actively involved in advanced research, development, and marketing of innovative products and projects utilizing interactive technologies and digital media for creative lifelong learning for nearly 40 years. Over the past 20 years, his focus has especially been on the use of desktop and web-based digital video and the Internet and web-based collaborative technologies for enabling new kinds of virtual collaboratories and online learning communities and knowledge gardens (see his colleague, Jack Park’s related work). Since 2004, with his wife and DesignWorlds cofounder, Frona, Ted has been especially focused on helping over 100 teens and college students make informed choices regarding possible colleges, graduate school programs, and potential early careers, based largely of helping them identify and use their natural strengths, interests, preferred learning styles and thinking talents, with DesignWorlds for College & Careers.
 
He is known internationally as a pioneer and innovator in action-research projects involving technology and learning in both K-12 schools and higher education, homes, workplaces and museums. His commercial business background at Atari, Picodyne Corporation, and Digital F/X, as well as research experience at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and the Institute for Research on Learning, included development and marketing of numerous award-winning educational multimedia products, hypermedia computer-based training systems, and complete user education strategies and support materials for new kinds of tools for lifelong learning and creativity.
 
Ted and his DesignWorlds team applied this background in creating the key web content and web educational marketing messages for Apple in 2000 to support their launch of iMovie, and this web content remained highlighted on Apple’s dv and education web site for over 16 months. Ted is a frequently invited keynote speaker and workshop presenter at national and international conferences on creative education, technology and learning. He consults for Fortune 500 companies, museums, school districts, and non-profit organizations, and has been a board member or advisor for numerous museums, government organizations, and public-private collaborations.
 
Ted was a visiting Senior Fellow and has taught at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and he is an adjunct faculty member of the Center for Social Justice in Education (School of Education) at the University of San Francisco (USF) and also with the Krause Center for Innovation at Foothill College. He has also been a GLEF Fellow of The George Lucas Educational Foundation. He earned his B.A. (1971) in computer science (with distinction), and his M.A (1973) and Ph.D. (1981) in psychology, all from University of California, Berkeley.
 
He is coauthor of the best-selling book, Atari Games and Recreations, (1980, with Herb Kohl and Len Lindsay), Exploring Creative Writer: Imaginative and Fun Activities (1995, with Herb Kohl and Barbara Kurshan), and of the innovative Amazon download Multimedia literacy at Rowland: “A good story, well told.”
 
Ted also coauthored Scaleable Integration of Educational Software: Exploring The Promise of Component Architectures and Bay Area Science Education Collaboratory Overview: A story of hope about students enthusiastically learning science, and authored Science Museum Learning Collaboratories: Helping to Bridge the Gap Between Museums’ Informal Learning Resources and Science Education in K-12 Schools and A New Model of Education: Designing Virtual Communities for Creativity and Learning.
 
Read Media X Lecture Series – Ted M. Kahn, PhD, “Journeys in Inventing the Future” and watch the video of this lecture. Read Symposium on Creativity: Synectics Presentation by NMC Fellow Ted Kahn and watch its video. Watch DesignWorlds for College – Comcast Newsmakers.