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Established: 9/19/94
Updated: 03/26/02

Russ Van Wyk, Cary Academy, Cary, NC

Russ Van Wyk russ_vanwyk@caryacademy.org teaches history at Cary Academy in Cary, NC and also serves as the school’s instructional technology coordinator. These responsibilities allow him to pursue his passion for using technologies to enable active learning and research. His philosophy is to keep his eye on the goal of enhancing learning, and he prefers “the benefit of low-hanging fruit to the idea of a killer-application that is rarely used.”

With funding from The National Endowment for the Humanities and The American Historical Association along with assistance from MidLink Magazine, Van Wyk developed the Web site “Social Science Laboratories via the Web: Active Learning with Data.” His primary objective in the project was to use the Web and electronic resources to interact with information in ways that were previously very difficult, if not impossible, for the average student. Van Wyk worked under the premise that students in the natural sciences have enjoyed laboratory environments for decades, and electronic instruments help historians enter the lab and become more active in interrogating primary sources. (See a sample project: The Final Analysis: Content Analysis.) He is ready to help you and your students enjoy the process and welcomes any comments or suggestions you have.

Van Wyk’s other projects include A People and a Nation, a companion Web site of Internet exercises in U.S. History for Mary Beth Norton, et al. Bedford University Press accepted his manuscript, co-authored with Samuel R. Williamson, entitled The July Crisis: A Study in Civil-Military Relations. Aside from being an author, Van Wyk is an active conference participant - recent presentations include Educause and The American Historical Association.

Prior to his work at Cary Academy, Van Wyk completed a Ph.D. in European history at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After receipt of the degree, he taught at the university for nearly a decade and promoted the evaluation of technology in research and learning as the assistant dean for technology and learning. He pioneered a distance education class on “The Contemporary World” and received funding to begin UNC’s Digital Library project.

As a MidLink Magazine editor, Van Wyk seeks to expand readership among high school students and faculty by enriching our offerings to and interactions with this audience. This year he is searching for classes that would like to understand their area and the U.S. census data by analyzing amazing data sets with detailed information at the county level (Making Sense of the Census!). Please let him know if he can work with you!

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