A talk by Melanie West (Co-founder of Tiz Media Foundation and Originator of MindRap)

Co-founder of Tiz Media Foundation and originator of MindRap, Melanie has over 20 years of professional experience. She spent 10 years as chief engineer of an experimental multimedia studio at Bell Laboratories. Her main focus was to create experiential prototypes and simulations of potential new services and products for AT&T. These prototypes were used in detailed quantitative experiments on people who would potentially use these new services. During that time Melanie took a leading role on many critical projects. She also had ten years experience in the music business as a recording engineer in New York City where she received a Platinum album for her work with the Talking Heads. Because of her interest in children, she spent a considerable amount of her own time training teachers in the Plainfield, NJ school system on the use of the Internet, helping them to integrate Internet applications into their curriculum. She also spent two years as an instructor at the Plainfield Science Center, which was a community center set up in an underprivileged neighbourhood that focused on getting the neighbourhood students interested in Science. Melanie holds an undergraduate degree in Music, Electrical Engineering and Communications, from Rutgers University, and a Masters degree in Interactive Telecommunications from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. In 2005 she was elected as a Macromedia Educational Leader.