As an educator, instructional designer, and author, David Stephan explores how data and information technologies affect learning and people’s lives. The changing nature and role of these technologies has been an interest of his for over fifty years. He has also asked, “How can technology best serve us?”
In his pursuits, he always remembered the prediction of a high school teacher: “One day when you get to be my age everyone will have a computer on their desks.” The wild prediction came true but many years earlier than that teacher could have imagined.
From that high school moment, David has always paid attention to new developments in information technology. He has collected experience with a wide range of systems, from the earliest multi-user mainframe-based systems to the most current, cloud-based systems. David has built and assembled systems and developed software from the smallest to largest systems. Through it all, he has never lost sight that the users are the most important part of any information system. That emphasis led him back to graduate business school.
One day, David was asked to be an instructor at the business school he had attended. That led to a new career teaching information systems to both undergraduates and graduates for almost 25 years. While doing that, David joined a new interdisciplinary program at Teachers College in which graduate students and their professors explored the future possibilities of what then was being called “new media.”
David developed an interest in improving instruction and one of his first acts was to design the first personal computer classroom at his school, resisting the impulse to create just another computer lab. Using that facility, he diverged from the standard IS curriculum, discarding factoids about computer technology to ask questions such as “What if a personal computer was combined with a cable TV system?” and to explore of issues that become know as digital convergence. He helped students to think about the disruptive organizational changes that new computing technologies were causing. He lobbied to discard from the introductory IS course such topics as the parts of a CPU, binary code tables, and other technical minutiae.
David was chosen to lead a special honors seminar whose theme was looking back at the previous 20 years. David’s premise was that more and more we view the world through a “digital filter,” an intermediary that can cause distortions between the real-world and ourselves. He did not expect that less than 10 years later, social media systems would demonstrate that point in an extreme.
Reflecting on the future, David became more focused on data and that led to collaboration with colleagues who taught statistics and operations research. That led to his current life exploring ways to improve business statistics and analytics courses and developing instructional materials for such courses.
David has been fortunate to experience some full circle moments in his life. As a struggling historical geology student, David sought techniques that would objectively show that different ancient ecosystems contain distinct fossil groupings. Little did he know that the methods he needed had either not been invented or made practical at that time. Years later, the predictive analytics methods he needed gained prominence and David was ready to explain in plain language how those methods worked.
He could not know that those methods would start to appear in textbooks such as the introductory business statistics textbook he once used in graduate school. And he never dreamed that he would be writing about those methods as a co-author of a textbook he had used in a much earlier edition!
Today, David continues his explorations to improve instruction in introductory business data analysis courses. A coauthor of several statistics and analytics books, David remains active in the DASI SIG of the Decision Sciences Institute. His current projects includes investigating how to use Generative AI in constructive ways for learning and exploring how introductory course curriculum could be changed to better conform to current educational goals such as fostering critical thinking.
