Otto's Page

Currently the Director of the Center for Scholarly Technology here at USC which involves leading efforts around technology-enhanced learning (TEL) and distance learning (DL) initiatives. Our role is to connect users to systems in a way that hopefully enables users. One of our efforts is being borne out in the Google Apps rollout for USC students that tries to accommodate students with an online environment that is natural and that connects students to common Web 2.0 apps. But it's really about Web 2.0 in the form of blogs, wikis, mobile, and more; meets traditional enterprise level instructional technologies such as Blackboard, iTunes U, MediaSite, and similar.

Before joining USC in 2002, I lived and worked in Silver City, New Mexico where I first started a regional arts and entertainment newspaper (http://www.desertexposure.com) and was an academic technology director at a small college (Western New Mexico University).

My passion for online connectivity and communications goes back to the Axon/XTV short-film/short-video user-generated content (UGC) project that I led between October 1992 and October 1995, and before that I was a program manager at Arizona State University's Center for European Studies -- connecting to Europe via Bitnet and publishing a print journal using Mac's first generation of desktop publishing.

The Axon Television project in particular was a project that was way ahead of its time, and involved user-generated short video and film content, mixed with cyber-centric professional content. Our group made it to USA Today, The Independent, Details magazine, and other publications. But we could not get funding in the pre-1996/7 dotcom boom period. To put it plainly: the project and concept was unfathomable by the stodgy cable and pre-Web industry. Our model did include the Web, but not as a delivery platform since this was the time of dial-up modems; rather, the Web as a community system --- a social network.

Find me at kommuniteezer

at Facebook and MySpace

My email is khera@usc.edu