With both conceptual and step-by-step lessons, this title teaches students the strategies and skills required to use the Internet as a valuable research tool.
I stumbled into textbook authoring out of necessity. Two decades ago, I wanted to teach people how to use personal computers to improve business productivity but couldn't find anyone publishing instructional material on the subject. So, I got sucked into creating it myself.
It turned out I had a knack for writing tutorial-style textbooks about computer technology. To my amazement, I somehow found the energy and time to author twenty-six textbooks, contribute to four others, and write dozens of technical articles for a variety of top journals and magazines, such as MIT's Technology Review, PC AI Magazine, and the Industry Standard.
Human-computer interaction fascinates me. Advances, such as electronic spreadsheets, expert systems, and graphical user interfaces, drove my early work. When personal computers first arrived on the scene, productivity software was rare and expensive. To provide students with the opportunity to learn to use these amazing programs, I pioneered the inclusion of free limited versions of software with textbooks.
I also came to understand the difference between "learning" and "teaching." The most effective way to learn software is to have students construct cumulative projects, which requires them to build upon what they have learned. All my textbooks focus on this "learning by making" (constructionism) pedagogy, which enables students to master complex computer skills easily and quickly.
My interest in artificial intelligence led to author the first textbook on expert systems development, and coauthor an award winning theoretical paper detailing the breakthroughs in this book regarding knowledge acquisition techniques. Soon after, I coauthored the first textbook about how to persuasively display business data graphically with a personal computer.
When Microsoft shipped Windows 3, it became clear that this graphical user interface (GUI) would change the way people interacted with personal computers. As a consequence, I wrote the first textbook on how to use Windows, with the 3.1 edition becoming a bestseller. The Windows textbook broke new ground in its extensive use of screenshots as reference points for students. I used this approach to spawn an entire series of textbooks featuring Windows-based productivity software. Taken together, these texts taught literally hundreds of thousands of students how to effectively and efficiently use personal computers with the Windows' GUI.
With advent of the Web, it occurred to me that "melding" the static nature of paper-based textbooks with the dynamic digital content of the Web offered the ideal means to deliver the most up-to-date learning experience possible. Thus, the hybrid college textbook was born. The first textbook to benefit from this fusion of paper and digital featured Netscape Navigator 1.0. I designed a Student Online Companion to work in concert with the book, thus, ensuring that as the Web evolved, so would the book. In a related vein, I invented the first Web-based instructor manual to accompany this textbook. Its decedents have saved textbook publishers millions in production and printing costs (--if only I had patented that invention! ;-).
After a decade of teaching and research at Gonzaga University, I left the life of professorship to write and teach online. Today, I teach a variety of online business courses and continue to author popular textbooks about intelligent Internet research tools and other emerging technologies.
