Virtual Field Trips to the Past
Jeffrey Pomerantz is a recovering academic and a founder of Proximal, an educational technology company democratizing experiential learning by building immersive learning experiences, and tools to help you build your own.
In a previous life, Pomerantz was a tenured Associate Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There, he taught courses on metadata and digital libraries, including a very early massive open online course (MOOC) on metadata. (It is sadly no longer available through Coursera, but the videos can still be found with some quick Googling.) His research agenda focused on digital libraries and online learning as vehicles for interdisciplinary and international collaboration. More recently, Pomerantz was an Associate Professor of Practice and the Online Program Coordinator at the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University in Boston.
In between those two, Pomerantz was a Senior Researcher with the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR), where he was the principal investigator on the Campus of the Future project. This was at the time, and still is the largest study on 3D and Extended Reality technologies in higher education.
That research is the origin story of Proximal, having found that there is a demand for XR experiences for education, but insufficient skill among educators to build their own. Proximal is trying to fill that niche.
Pomerantz is also the author of two books from MIT Press: Metadata, one of the first titles published in the Essential Knowledge series, and Standards (coming soon), co-authored with Jason Griffey, Director of Strategic Initiatives for the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).