Rob Garfield

Currently, Rob works as an Educational Technologist and the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. His projects include the Global Classroom and the Millennium Village Simulation among many others. The Global Classroom (presented at Educause 2008) is an experiment in synchronous distributed learning that mobilizes learners at 12 institutions on five continents to explore multidisciplinary problems in sustainable development collaboratively. Instead of seeing distance as a barrier, the project embraces diverse locations and cultures to enrich the educational experience.

The Millennium Village Simulation is a Web-based simulation of economics and survival for one family and their village in a sub-Saharan African village. In a virtual world of extreme poverty, disease, and environmental variability, students are challenged to help a family of two survive and prosper over a fifty-year period.

For the two years prior to joining CCNMTL in January, 2007, he worked as an AI/Gameplay programmer for a military simulation/training contractor in Orlando, Florida. Prior to that, he taught game development at Full Sail Real World Education in Winter Park, Florida, focusing on preproduction practices in creating real-time 3D game applications.

Before taking the plunge into the world of real-time applications, Rob spent some years in publishing in New York for such diverse publications as Grand Street, Bomb and Spy as well as pursuing his own career as a poet. He "grew up" technologically as a tools developer and technical writer for Chase Manhattan Bank and Citibank in the mid to late 1990s.