Jean Forward is a lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She teaches Introduction to North American Indians, Contemporary Issues of North American Indians with a focus on the Northeast. As part of a collaborative, cross-disciplinary effort, she has team taught Ethnicity in Massachusetts over interactive video. She has recently edited a European volume, Endangered Peoples: Struggles to Survive, as part of a reference series and co-authored a chapter on the Scottish Highlands. Jean is interested in understanding how ethnic identities can be peacefully passed on. She holds a Masters of Arts in Teaching/Anthropology from University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Steve Kapinos is a Senior Systems Engineer with Tandberg USA

William Moebius is Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative literature at UMass where he has been involved each year for the past four years in a collaborative distance learning course, Poets and Poetry of New England. With the Amherst campus as the coordinating site, he has served as the moderator of weekly interactive video conversations among faculty and students at as many as four other campuses of the Massachusetts higher education system. For broadcast on Channel 57, WGBY, he has also scripted and delivered two course-related videos, while serving as interviewer or moderator for three others.

John G. Stoffolano is a Professor of Entomology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Professor Stoffolano has been involved in distance education since 1996 when he taught the first University of Massachusetts course using MCET (Massachusetts Corporation for Educational Telecommunication). The course was sent via satellite to 127 teachers throughout the U.S. Since then he has taught his course for teachers (Entomology 671 "Using Insects in the Classroom) each year to two or three sites simultaneously using the PicTel studio at the Division of Continuing Education. Currently he is putting this course online using the eCollege platform.

Wako Tawa is Chair and Professor of the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations at Amherst College. She also directs the Japanese language program in her department. She and her colleagues in the Japanese language program have been pioneers in piloting use of the Five College interactive video classrooms to evaluate Japanese speaking. These daily and weekly sessions are taking place during the fall and spring semesters.

Thomas Wartenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College where
he chairs the Film Studies Program. His publications include Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance As Social Criticism and The Forms Of Power. He has edited a number of anthologies, most recently, The Nature Of Art. He has been involved for a number of years in the public schools, where he assists elementary school teachers in teaching philosophy using children's literature.

Patricia Widmayer is the former Director of the North Suburban Higher Education Consortium where she worked for more than a decade. In that role, she oversaw the design, construction, and continuing support for a thirty-five site interactive video network and a high-speed (OC3) data network between the colleges and universities in Chicago and the northern suburbs. The consortium includes, among others, Northwestern University, DePaul University, Northeastern Illinois University, Illinois Institute of Technology, three community colleges, the Chicago Historical Society, the Adler Planetarium, and five high schools. She has also been engaged in program development for the interactive video network. For four years, in tandem with her tenure as consortium director, she was Special Assistant to the Vice President for Information Technology at Northwestern, leading in the creation of a joint community initiative called e-TropolisEvanston. She co-authored The Digital Network Infrastructure and Metropolitan Chicago, a blueprint for creating a high-speed regional network. The report was written for the Metropolitan Planning Council of Chicago and led to this year's launch of the City of Chicago's CivicNet project. Patricia twice co-chaired the (Illinois) Governor's Education Technology Summit, and served on the Governor's ten-member panel that reorganized higher education in Illinois. Prior to her work with Northwestern, she headed her own Chicago-based consulting firm to which she has returned. She holds a B.A. and a Ph.D. from Michigan State University.