Feb 3, 2015 Molly Lynn Watt 5PM

Molly Lynn Watt

`Molly Lynn Watt is an educator, researcher, writer and activist. She was born in Danbury, Connecticut.
In 1963 she worked for Highlander Education and Research Center co-directing The North-South Smokey Mountain Workcamp with her then husband, Robert Lincoln Gustafson, in Townsend, Tennessee. The camp was raided and all participants landed in the Maryville Jail while the camp facilities were mysteriously burned. She moved back to the Boston area and directed work camps in Roxbury, Mass, sponsored by the A.F.S.C. and eleven local organizations including Norfolk Community Center, Freedom House, Saint Mark's Social Center, the B.R.A. and others groups. The goal for the camps was education of participants through working with residents in addressing housing and education issues.
During the 1970s she was active in the Open Education Movement and co-founded one of the nation's first teacher centers located in Brookline, Mass. She supported teachers as writers about their own practice, co-founding with Sarah Hull, Claryce Evans and Margaret Stubbs, The Children's Thinking Network Newsletter, published for five years from 40 Reservoir St. in Cambridge, MA. She was an Associate of the Prospect School in Bennington, Vermont,
In the 1980s, as an activist for experiential, hands-on learning, she traveled extensively giving key note talks at educational conferences and hands-on workshop putting the learner in charge. She advocated using the Logo computer language as a mathematical "sandbox" and the Bankstrret Writer as a blank page inviting free writing to encourage learners creativity consistent with research on the writing process. (This was at a time when there was a parallel development in programmed lessons for educational uses of computers.) In 1986 she traveled with a delegation of six educators to the People's Education Press in Beijing, China to lead the Logo and Educational Computing Workshop for 40 top educators in China. Apple gave them a computer lab as a gift to the Press which was at that time publishing all the curriculum for the 180 million school children on tradition presses. She wrote a monthly column in Teaching and Computers magazine called "Ask Molly", contributed articles toothier magazines, wrote a Logo Curriculum, "Welcome to Logo" published by D.C. Heath and co-authored Teaching wit Logo" with her husband, Daniel Watt, published by Addison Wesley in 1986.
In the 1990s until her retirement at Educational Development, Inc. she led projects funded by the NSF to support teachers of Logo conducting research in their own classrooms, editing a of teacher research with Daniel Watt, New Paradigms in Classroom Research, published by ICC. She took Action Research on-line as part of the Department of Education funded NCIP (national network of special education educators sharing best practices in inclusion.). She founded and directed the Action Research Center at E.D.C. in Newton,MA.
She is a founding member of Cambridge Cohousing where she has lived since 1998 with her husband, Daniel Lynn Watt and 88 others from age 1 to 90, determined to work together to reduce their carbon footprint and make decisions by consensus.
In 2004 she with Daniel Lynn Watt edited, published and performed excerpts of letters his parents exchanged during the Spanish Civil War. His father George Watt was a volunteer in the Lincoln Battalion and his mother Ruth Watt was an organizer and supporter in New York City. George and Ruth: Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War.Molly Lynn Watt started hosting monthly poetry readings, The Fireside Series, in Cambridge, MA, became the editor for the BagelBards Anthology #1, #2, #3, #4. She served for several years as editor for poetry in the HILR Literary Review, and in 2007 Ibbetson Street Press published her f=volume of poetry, Shadow People.

Michael C. Keith: Media Historian, Memoirist, Fiction writer: Jan 20, 2015 5PM

Michael C. Keith

Michael is the author of over 20 books on electronic media, as well as a memoir and three books of fiction. In 2009, he coedited a found manuscript by legendary writer/director Norman Corwin. What he refers to as his “fringe” group series consists of a monograph that examines the use of broadcast media by Native Americans—Signals in the Air (Praeger, 1995), a book that explores the nature and role of counterculture radio in the sixties—Voices in the Purple Haze (Praeger, 1997), a book that probes the extreme right-wing’s exploitation of the airwaves—Waves of Rancor (M.E. Sharpe, 1999, with Robert Hilliard), a book that examines the role of gays and lesbians in broadcasting—Queer Airwaves (M.E. Sharpe, 2001, with Phylis Johnson), a book about broadcasting and the First Amendment—Dirty Discourse (Blackwell, 2003, with Robert Hilliard), and a volume that evaluates the loss of localism in American radio—The Quieted Voice (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005, with Robert Hilliard).


Keith is also the author of the most widely adopted text on American radio—The Radio Station, 8th edition (Focal Press, 2010), an oral history—Talking Radio (M.E. Sharpe, 2000), a study of nocturnal broadcasting –Sounds in the Dark (Iowa State University Press, 2001), and The Broadcast Century, 4th edition (Focal Press, 2005, with Robert Hilliard. His most recent books include Radio Cultures (Peter Lang, 2010) and Sounds of Change (University North Carolina Press, 2010, with Christopher Sterling). He is also the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, The Next Better Place (Algonquin Books, 2003), as well as numerous journal articles and two books of short stories––And Through the Trembling Air and Hoag's Object. He has been invited to lecture internationally.
Prior to joining Boston College, Keith served as Chair of Education at the Museum of Broadcast Communications. He is co-founder of the Broadcast Education Association’s Radio Division, was director of the communication program at Dean College, and served as an invited professor at George Washington University and Marquette University. He is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the International Radio Television Society’s Stanton Fellow Award, the Broadcast Education Association's Distinguished Scholar Award, and the University of Rhode Island’s Achievement Award in the Humanities.

He is the author of several short story collections including  The Collector of Tears, and If Things Were Made to Last Forever ( Big Table Publishing).