Bonnie DeVarco Digital Portfolio

Bonnie DeVarco explores the leading edge of visualization technologies. She has served as an education technology consultant to non-profit, corporate and educational organizations for the past 18 years (including PBS, Stanford University, the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT), San Diego and Imperial County Boards of Education, James Burke's Knowledge Web, UC Santa Cruz, UCOP, Smithsonian Institute, DigitalSpace, Silicon Graphics and others). She helped develop multi-institutional programs for distance and media enhanced learning for the University of California Office of the President and served as research and development consultant for the UC College Prep Initiative (UCCP), one of the first statewide virtual high school programs 1998-2003. She founded and directed the VLearn3D initiative, an international networking hub for educators employing multi-user environments to enhance the learning process (1998-2004). She has regularly produced educational events in cyberspace and in distributed physical locations through Vlearn3D.org, UC Santa Cruz's "Tech Innovation" program and UCLA. From 1989 to 1995 she was chief archivist for the Buckminster Fuller Archive, now housed in Special Collections at Stanford University's Green Library.

For the past five years, Bonnie developed and co-directed LinkWorld, a 3D multi-user world for high school students through the BorderLink Project, a federally funded Technology Innovation Challenge Grant. She also serves as in the inaugural year as senior researcher and is currently advisor to the NSF funded Interactive Earth 2 Project, a next generation interactive learning environment for Earth Systems Science led by WorldLink Media [in collaboration with TERC, NASA Goddard and the World Resources Institute (WRI)]. She serves on the founding Board of Accuracy&Aesthetics and is a founding member of the World Resources Simulation Center (WRSC) and Spaceship Earth: The Game, a project of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and Cal(IT)2 at UC Irvine.

In addition to producing a broad range of educational media for clients listed above, Bonnie has lectured worldwide on emerging technologies in education, virtual worlds, next generation geographic information systems, information visualization and the culture of cyberspace. She leads efforts to research, explore and develop new opportunities for telecollaboration, visualization, education and cross-disciplinary problem-solving using advanced satellite and network technologies, visualization and open source tools. She is currently co-authoring a book with visual journalist and founder of Visual Insight, Eileen Clegg on the history and evolution of visual language.


	BorderLink's Linkworld - Virtual World January 2000 to 2005 In collaboration with Carol Kerney of the BorderLink Project, DeVarco developed and produced "LinkWorld" a 3D world with Active Art Design for the San Diego and Imperial County Boards of Education. This world was used for mentoring, counseling and course support for high school students taking online Advanced Placement Courses. Continue development, implementation and events in LinkWorld. SEE HISTORY OF BORDERLINK WORLD HERE

	"Building Blocks for Virtual Worlds" August. 2002 to April 2003 Principle Investigator with Katy Borner and Margaret Corbit, for the research project, "Design Principles for Virtual Worlds in Education." This project is funded by a seed grant from the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT).

	VLearn3D Web Site and Library 2000-2003 Continued direction and development of the Vlearn3D initiative of the Contact Consortium with roundtables, conferences, research projects, online library, annotated resource center, virtual tour and event worlds. Co-Produced VLearn3D 2000 and VLearn3D 2001 conferences in cyberspace.

	Educator's Track - Avatars '98 and Avatars '99 Fall 1998, Winter 1999 As a Board Member of the Contact Consortium spearheading the Educational Mission -- "V-Learn," DeVarco chaired and coordinated the 1998 Education Track featuring educators and students from Cornell University, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, UCSC and the University of Cincinnati. She also chaired and produced the Educator's speaker track entitled "Evaluating the Performance Value of Virtual Worlds in Education." This track featured a poster session, a panel with researchers and practitioners discussing case studies and the latest research on 3D virtual learning spaces and their relevance to education.

	LIFELEARN'S BioLearn - Virtual World February 1999 to 2003 Developed and produced a 3D world with Active Art Design for Greg Steltenpohl, founder of Odwalla and the Interra Project. This world is a companion to the proposed Bioregional Learning Center of N. California Coast and features galleries with global information, cyberlife and lifeform galleriers and a true to life coastal area with a kelp forest and a cliffside learning center. This virtual world is discussed in the Corbit/DeVarco paper, SciCentr and BioLearn: Two 3D Implementations of CVE Science Museums. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Collaborative Virtual Environments – September 2000

	"VHS Virtual High School" March to June 1998 As director, conceptualizer, content provider and networker, DeVarco spearheaded the development of the 3D Virtual High School demonstration Module in Active Worlds. This module, built by Active Art Design and hosted by Bruce Damer and Stuart Gold in TheU, features an office with office hours, Spanish Wing, Science Lab with a chemistry simulation in the "Student WebQuest Wing," and a gallery show on Geometry and Art.

	VLearn3D Initiative 2000-2003 Continued direction and development of the Vlearn3D initiative of the Contact Consortium with roundtables, conferences, research projects, online library, VLearn virtual tour world, VLearn Biblioteca Alexandrina virtual library and Conference World. Co-Produced VLearn3D 2000 and VLearn3D 2001 conferences in cyberspace.

Web Sites & Web Projects

	Porcelainia - Metaphors of Geometric Proportion November 1996 to present Co-webmaster in charge of text, concept and editing (and assisting in design and production) of a unique digital portfolio for Bobby Jaber, porcelain artist. Jaber's innovative combination of science and art features many series of artworks that celebrate and are dedicated to scientists, physicists, mathematicians and woman scientists from all periods of history.

	UCWrite - Online Writing Institute 2001-2003 Web Development consultant for the University of California Writing Insitute, a multi-institutional collaborative funded by the University of California Teaching, Learning and Technology Center. In addition, co-designer (with Marian McNamee) of site, logo and graphics.

	James Burke's Knowledge Web Project 2001 to 2002 In the first year of James Burke's Online Knowledge Web Project, DeVarco worked on research for the Graphics User Interface Design (GUI). Virtual World Studio joined DeVarco and James Burke on a volunteer video production co-producing an 8-minute media demo of the K-Web vision for fundraising launch efforts.

	The UC College Prep Initiative January 1999 to 2002 Development research, content production, design and support for the web site and early development of the UCCP Initiative. This project is funded by the University of California Office of the President and provides online college preparatory courses for high school students who otherwise would not have the opportunity to become eligible or competitively eligible for admission to the University of California.

	The Santa Cruz Faculty Association August 1998 to 2002 Design and production of a web site for the Santa Cruz Faculty Association. This site features an archive of information and links to UC faculty association newsletters, updates and members.

	Virtual High School Feasibility Study Spring 1998 to Winter 1998 VHS Feasibility Study Team based at University of California, Santa Cruz. [This project was funded and debuted in Spring, 1999 as the UCCP - UC College Prep Initiative]

On the Work of R. Buckminster Fuller

	Bringing Digital Earth Down to Earth The 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth June 5-8, 2007 The International Symposium on Digital Earth (ISDE), a nonprofit initiative spearheaded by Dr. Timothy Foresman, has kept the 10-year old Digital Earth project evolving through an international series of conferences around the world. The Digital Earth Project aims to create a a virtual representation of our planet that enables a person to explore and interact with the vast amounts of natural and cultural information gathered about the Earth. DeVarco is on the Planning Committee of the 2007 Conference which will be held in San Francisco in June.

	Stone, Water, Spirit March 12, 2006 This fundraising event drew upon the threads of art, design, physics, psychology, and visual history to raise a seed grant for the Compassion Fund of Tara Home, compassionate care for the end of life at Land of Medicine Buddha in Soquel, CA. Included DeVarco's presentation "Beauty Truth & Stewardship" - featuring Dynamic Archetypes for Visual Communication.

	Places & Spaces - Cartography of the Physical and the Abstract Special Gallery Exhibit at ESRI July 2005 As part of the groundbreaking new Places & Spaces Travelling Exhibition series produced by Katy Börner and Deborah McPherson, DeVarco curated and mounted a unique GIS version of the show for the Annual ESRI User's Conference in San Diego, California featuring an additional globe by Todd Ulrich at WorldFX and new Tsunami Maps and digital flythroughs by John Graham at SDSU Visualization Lab and GeoFusion.

	EnVISION '05 - Exploring a New Visualization Infrastructure January 19, 2005 This workshop produced by Bonnie DeVarco and Katy Börner brought together leaders of the fields of InfoVis and Geovisualization at the Silicon Graphics Campus and NASA Ames. The goal was to focus on the evolution of advanced visualization technologies that take advantage of the rise of geospatial literacy, location-based technologies, social network technologies, GeoVis, InfoVis and collaborative visualization. (Selected Video).

	BorderLink Events for Students & Mentors in LinkWorld 2000-2005 LinkWorld is an educational "virtual world" (3D website with avatars and chat function) that allows teachers and students to collaborate at a distance, link learners with experts, and connect students with authors, scientists, artists, mathematicians, etc. - whether living or dead. LinkWorld is part of the BorderLink Project, a six-year federally-funded Technology Innovation Challenge Grant designed to impact the lives of high school students of Imperial and rural San Diego Counties through the use of technology in education. See LinkWorld Video Highlights of student events.

	VLearn3D Virtual Conferences in Cyberspace 1998 to 2002 As pioneers in Virtual Worlds and Education, DeVarco and Margaret Corbit from Cornell Theory Center established an international hub for maverick educators in the Education Universe in ActiveWorlds. This series was organized under VLearn3D.org, a Special Interest Group of the nonprofit Contact Consortium. From 1998 to 2002 international conferences were held in avatar-inhabited cyberspace culminating in the 2002 "Building Blocks for Virtual Worlds" conference that focused on lessons learned in the "virtual field." Katy Borner and her team at Indiana University developed visualization tools intended to support social navigation, the evaluation and optimization of three-dimensional virtual worlds, and the study of their evolving communities. This led them to create this beautiful and uprecedented dynamic visualization of the conference activities.


	QuantumVIZ: Social Networks, Planetary Visualization & Dynamic InfoScapes - 2D, 3D, ND" June 10, 2002 Co-produced QuantumVIZ - Social Networks, Planetary Visualization & Dynamic InfoScapes - 2D, 3D, N-D" - a multi-venue invitation-only event for leaders of the field of information technology, geospatial visualization and global ecology. This event was held at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and galvanized a host of new projects between more than 25 presenters and 200 guests.

	Geometry - The Language of Art and Science August 1998 to present Working with designers from Active Art Design in London, DeVarco curated and developed interactive content for a show on Geometry and Art for the Virtual High School. This fully interactive 3D gallery linked to more than 40 web pages can be visited at TheU and Zg world in Active Worlds. See storyboard of this gallery at the link on the right. `

	Tech Innovation 2000 Spring and Fall 2000 As Special Projects Consultant, launched one-year program through UCSC's Faculty Instructional Technology Center. This program features innovative learning technologies and innovators in the fields of distance learning, visualization and computer mediated education. "EarthVIZ" was the Kick-off event held on May 25th, 2000

	"Building Global Communities through E-Learning, Collaboratories and Knowledge Networks" October 13 & 14, 2000 Production of the second two-day multi-venue conference and workshop was presented as part of the Tech Innovation 2000 series that featured 20 speakers and hands-on workshops with leading edge collaboration technologies in education.

	V-UCSC - The UCSC Virtual World Tour Project August 1998 to 2002 As Director, DeVarco spearheaded the partnership of a group of UCSC students with the 3D architects of Active Art Design in London to develop the first 3D, realistic and to-scale version of the UCSC campus for prospective students. This project, which served as a virtual collaborative education experiment, was commissioned by the Admissions Dept. of the University of California, Santa Cruz (OASAS). DeVarco collaborated with Virtual World Studio to produce V-UCSC: A Collaborative Place in Cyberspace, a video walkthrough tour of the world and the building project itself in 2000.

	Borderlink Leadership Committee, Teacher Workshop Series Fall 2001 to present Continued development of teacher workshops, mentoring and events in LinkWorld, art, language and history events, and CollegeQuest, a virtual counseling center and college preparation game for participants of the Borderlink Project in San Diego and Imperial Counties.


	"Life, Facts & Artifacts" Buckminster Fuller's Archive - PBS page April 1996 This essay, featured in the PBS "Thinking Out Loud" companion site to the American Masters Special (which debuted in 1996) presents an extensive overview of Buckminster Fuller's lifetime experiment -- his archive. Fuller's archive is considered the "most extensive personal archive in existence." This web site is now a permanent part of the PBS online archive.

	"Invisible Architecture - The NanoWorld of Buckminster Fuller" August 1997 Writer and producer of a grant-funded 60-page essay linked to more than 200 unique sites on the WWW. "Invisible Architecture places Buckminster Fuller into a contemporary context by juxtaposing the relevance of his ideas to some of the newest technological advances of the latter part of this century - including the newest work on buckminsterfullerene and nanotechnology.

	"Earth as a Lens - Global Collaboration, GeoCommunication, and The Birth of EcoSentience" June 2004 This article, appearing in the inaugural issue of PlaNetwork Journal explores the leading edge of visualization technologies, wireless, mobile computing and GPS to identify how close we are to creating a fully functioning NanoInfoBioSocioGeoAstro viewer, an "Immersive Earth", inspired by Buckminster Fuller's decades-old vision of the Geoscope Minni-Earth.

	"Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map" - PBS page April 1996 This essay on Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map and the philosophy behind it was featured in the PBS "Thinking Out Loud" companion site to the American Masters Special which debuted in 1996. This web site is now a permanent part of the PBS archive pages.

	World Game Institute's NetWorld Game November - January 1997 As part of the production team of World Game Institute's online global game funded by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, I produced the link section which acts as a "Global Researcher's Toolkit" featuring over 200 annotated links to pages on environmentalism and sustainability, Embassies worldwide, The United Nations and other NGO's, Amnesty International and other global linktanks and thinktanks.