Bonnie DeVarco

Education Innovation is a "4-part overview of Buckminster Fuller's approaches to Education and their intersection with Education Technology on the leading edge in the new millenium." | Copyright 2002, Bonnie Goldstein DeVarco. All rights reserved.

The article appears on the author's website as part of Media Tertia, an extensive digital portfolio of work dedicated to "emerging technologies in education." The site includes 2 important essays about Fuller: "Life, Facts & Artifacts" and which are both featured in the PBS Thinking Out Loud companion website to the American Masters Special on Buckminster Fuller which debuted in 1996). Also included, is Ms Devarco's seminal 1997 digital work; "Invisible Architecture - The NanoWorld of Buckminster Fuller" (1997), in which Ms. Devarco places Fuller "into a contemporary context by juxtaposing the relevance of his ideas to some of the newest technological advances of the latter part of this century - including the newest work on buckminsterfullerene and nanotechnology."




Emerging Technologies in Education

Bonnie DeVarco regularly writes and lectures on emerging technologies in education, virtual worlds, next generation geographic information systems, information visualization and the culture of cyberspace. She is currently Senior Researcher and Project Coordinator for the NSF funded Interactive Earth 2 Project, a next generation interactive for Earth Systems Science led by WorldLink Media, TERC, NASA Goddard and the World Resources Institute (WRI). And for the past five years, she developed and co-directed LinkWorld, a 3D multi-user world for high school students, as part of the Borderlink Project, a federally funded Technology Innovation Challenge Grant. Through Planetwork.org, Telascience.org and other non profit organizations and educational institutions, Ms. DeVarco leads efforts to research, explore and develop new opportunities for telecollaboration, visualization, education and environmental action using advanced satellite and network technologies, visualization and open source tools.

Ms. DeVarco has served as an education technology consultant to non-profit, corporate and educational organizations for the past 16 years (this list includes PBS, Stanford University, the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies, San Diego and James Burke's Knowledge Web, UC Santa Cruz, UCOP, Smithsonian Institute, DigitalSpace and others). She has helped develop multi-institutional programs for distance and media enhanced learning for the University of California Office of the President and the K-12 as a research and development consultant for the UC College Prep Initiative, one of the first statewide virtual high school programs since 1998.

As a member of the Board of Directors for the Contact Consortium, Ms. DeVarco founded the VLearn3D initiative in 1998. Vlearn3D is an international networking hub for educators using multi-user environments to enhance the learning process. She has regularly produced educational events in cyberspace and in distributed physical locations through Vlearn3D.org, UC Santa Cruz's "Tech Innovation" program, UCLA, the Los Angeles Festival, Telascience and the Buckminster Fuller Institute. From 1989 to 1995 she was chief archivist for the Buckminster Fuller Archives, recently acquired by Stanford University.

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