A short bio:

Dr. Norm Friesen is a Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. Dr. Friesen has been developing and studying Web technologies in educational contexts since 1995, and is the principal investigator in the "learningspaces.org" project sponsored by SSHRC (the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada). Dr. Friesen has previously worked as a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, and has also worked as an adjunct or visiting faculty member at Athabasca University (Canada's Open University), at the University of Toronto, and at the Leopold Franzens University, Innsbruck, Austria. In addition to authoring dozens of articles and reports, Dr. Friesen has produced several editions of books on the instructional use of WebCT and on the implementation of the IEEE Learning Object Metadata standard. His academic credentials include Master's degrees from the University of Alberta and the Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta.