Rationale:   Research and Development is a "front end" investment that is not immediately or even quickly amortized. It is, however, essential to maintaining competitive levels of service with respect to on-line teaching and learning. "Today's R&D is tomorrow's air supply."

The Work:   Frank Lowney's R&D work is largely a symbiosis between action research and production design and development. The focus of that work for the past several years has been on technologies that appear to offer the greatest return on investment (ROI) in terms of the range of educational objectives to which they may be applied. Learning Management Systems and the QuickTime Media Architecture have been ongoing areas of interest but Podcasting and other "Web 2.0" technologies are fast coming into prominence. GCSU was the first educational institution to use the iPod for instructional purposes in 2002. This was well in advance of what is now called podcasting. Thus, by 2005 when "podcast" became the word of the year, GCSU was perfectly positioned to take a leadership position in Podcasting and the educational use of the iPod. Much of that story is told on the GCSU iPod site.

The Future:   Future research is likely to include a significant level of attention paid to a class of tools referred to with the unbrella term, "Web 2.0." Web 2.0 tools center on the learner more than on the instructor and generally eschew intermediation of any sort. It will be interesting to see how academe and the corporate education establishment respond to technologies that seem to be aimed at modifying and possibly diminishing their role in the teaching and learning processes.