Gerry's Personal and Biographical Web

Gerry in woods

My personal webpage below includes a number of topics, especially current activities during my retirement.
More detail on these topics can be found at pages focused on my study of the salt marshes in Chatham and my works of sculpture.

For further discussion of topics from my life and work, see volume 18.Overview and Autobiographical Essays..

Celebrating 80 years!

On March 16, 2025, I celebrated my 80th birthday. The whole Stahl family came to Cape Cod to mark the milestone. Pictures and reflections are available at Celebrating 80 years!

Preserving Chatham's Salt Marshes

Since retiring to Cape Cod, I have been fascinated by the salt marshes, which are an important part of the local environment in many way.

I joined the Board of the local land trust, the Chatham Conservation Foundation, in 2017.
I was its Treasurer and served on its Executive Committee.
As chair of the Technology Committee, I updated the accounting system and the membership database.
To promote environmental restoration and preservation in the face of climate change, I started a Salt Marsh Task Force, which I chaired until I resigned from the Foundation in November 2021.

A year later, I joined the Energy and Climate Action Committee of the Town of Chatham, through appointment by the Select Board in September 2022. ECAC had determined that its major priority is to help preserve Chatham's salt marshes.
In October 2022, ECAC submitted a proposal I developed for a grant to support this effort.
In November and December 2022, I began to prototype a GIS map to identify potential migration areas for salt marshes in Chatham to migrate to in response to the rise of sea level and increasing storm intensity from climate change.
My work on ECAC is documented on my webpage about Preserving Chatham's Salt Marshes

catch.up.me

a sketchy overview of my life for those who missed significant segments

(pdf 1.3 mb)

a career in informatics

my relationship with computers, from toys to artifacts for philosophical reflection

(pdf 3 mb)

community development in Philadelphia

a history of the Southwest Germantown CDC (1978-1985)

(pdf 350 kb)

glimpses of my years at Drexel
(2002-2014)

some photos while I was a professor at Drexel University

retirement from Drexel
(2015)

I became an emeritus professor and had retirement events at Drexel and CSCL 2015

My Drexel Courses

My courses were heavily computer-supported, so that the course materials are freely available to share. My teaching at Colorado and Drexel is documented on my teaching page. Here is a sample of my last classes on human-computer interaction and information theory, illustrating my teaching using CSCL:

Spring 2007, INFO 608: Designing Social Interaction Software.
...designing software to support the VMT user community.

Spring 2008, INFO 110: Designing for CSCL.
...designing software to support the CSCL research community.

Spring 2009, INFO 782: Issues in Informatics.
...a graduate seminar on post-cognitive theories of cognition.

Spring 2009, INFO 105: Introduction to Informatics.
...an undergraduate exploration of classic texts in informatics theory.

My Research History

Although most of my research during the past several years has been related to the VMT project, I worked on a variety of projects earlier. Since the development of the Web I have documented my research on my website. The following links go to brief descriptions of my research projects while in Boulder and later. Most of them revolved around software systems I programmed and tested. My biggest systems were Hermes and WebGuide, both discussed in my book on "Group Cognition" (Chapters 4 and 6).

Research at Drexel. grant proposals at Drexel and the Math Forum.

Research in Europe ITCOLE project, BSCL, Synergia.

Research in Colorado WebGuide, State the Essence, Organizational Memory, Articulate Learners, Gamble Gulch, L3D Lab, Communications Theory.

Research previously Hermes, OMOL, WebNet, CIE, TCA, CREW, OptoNet, consulting and programming.

Biographical

In the mid-1990's, when the Web was young, I started my website in much the same format as it has now. I experimented with including both professional and family materials on the same site. As you can see from the archived versions of my site from 1997, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2009, it has maintained that format for two decades now. The site still includes biographical data about my education and pictures of friends, family, home, recreation and leisure time activities, including a gallery of some of my earlier sculpture

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Education

MIT, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Northwestern, Colorado

Family & Friends

Carol Bliss, Rusty, Zake, Kimlou, Nastasja, Alan, Bill Hanauer, Ben, Evelyn

Christmas/New Year letters: 1999/2000, 2007/08, 2008/09, 2009/2010, 2010/2011, 2011/2012, 2012/2013, 2013/2014