Brooke Tindal, 15, used to commute 16 miles from her home in Queens to her elementary and middle schools in Brooklyn, waking up at 5:50 a.m. every morning to get there.
Interestingly, given the group that it was sent to, we all agreed that the article wasn’t a bad one and presented K-12 online learning in a fair light – that is until it could to this part.
Who is this Nathan Holbert you might ask – and between the four of us who were a part of this e-mail conversation we represented collectively about a century of experience in the field and were wondering the same thing. His faculty profile at Columbia describes his faculty expertise as including “Digital Innovation” and “Education Technology” – which I suppose you could argue might be generic or broad ways to describe virtual learning.
If you look at his Google Scholar profile, he self-described research interests include: constructionism, design, making, computer science Education, and game-based learning.
A review of his publications on that page suggest that the closest he has been to K-12 virtual learning is one conference proceeding and one journal article about the use of online portfolios to reflect on maker space projects, and on conference proceedings about the use of synchronous and asynchronous student feedback in a maker space environment.
This is not to knock Dr. Holbert. Beyond a fellow UGA grad that I know, I think if I had a question about maker spaces I think Dr. Holbert would be high on my list of folks to contact. But for an article about the use of K-12 online learning in a post-pandemic world to provide certain students with opportunities that were clearly being prevented in the traditional brick-and-mortar environment, I’m not sure how the journalist in this case did a search on Google Scholar or just Google and (a) found Dr. Holbert in the first place, and then (b) decided on his expertise on the topic?!?
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Virtual School Meanderings 
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