Matt lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife Cynthia and two young children, Diego and Fiona. He’s a doctoral student at Teachers College Columbia University in the program in Communications, Computing, and Technology in Education. His research interests include social software, social networks, wikis, blogs, mobile computing, peer-to-peer computing, peer-to-peer learning, and software and language learning.

Cynthia & Diego at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Matt has extensive experience as a software engineer, working on many large software projects for the web and for mobile phones and other handheld devices. He was one of the original founders and first CTO of Crisp Wireless and more recently has been a lead software engineer and architect at the media research firm, Nielsen IAG.

Matt and Diego admire Fiona at the hospital

Before becoming a professional programmer, Matt spent several years working in K-12 education. As a Teach For America corps member, directly out of college, Matt spent two years teaching bilingual education and ESL to the children of migrant workers in the Mississippi Delta. He returned to New York and continued working for two years in the public schools, as a technology consultant to District 32 in Bushwick, Brooklyn, implementing a new technology based hardware and software initiative to improve reading and math performance district wide.

At Teachers College Matt has been involved in several, diverse research projects. His dissertation tries to understand the interaction between social software — networked collaborative software — and theories of freedom. He’s looking at 4 key theorists, Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, Maxine Greene, and Jacques Rancière, who are concerned with freedom and education. These theories of freedom insist that personal learning and initiative are requisite for realizing freedom. Working from this point of view, Matt hopes to expand the discussion of the Internet and freedom.

At Columbia Matt is one of the core researchers working on the StudyPlace project, a wiki dedicated to the study of educational theory and practice. He was one of the key researchers for the multi-year research project, STEPS-to-Literacy, a program for emergent bilingual writers that combines a custom web environment designed to support bilingual learners with a novel curricular approach.

For the past three semesters he’s taught Programming II, the department’s second semester programming course, with a focus on object oriented programming.

After completing his doctorate in May 2009, Matt hopes to attain a faculty or research position where he can continue his research into how social software systems function. In the next phase of his dissertation research he hopes to move from the theoretical to the more practical, exploring what software design features support the struggle for freedom.