MVP Dr. Jonathan Marshall, Chair of the MHS SATp Website Committee

Jonathan Marshall says he loves working with computers, but that description understates a career dedicated to computer science, artificial intelligence, and tapping the powers of the web for education and business. Marshall is also interested in tapping the powers of the web for education and business. His interest in computers began when he was a boy and continued in college at Harvard and graduate school at Boston University. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Marshall taught computer science, specializing in neural networks and vision. He says he particularly enjoys applying theory to real world problems, and teaching evolved into a wide variety of private sector consulting posts.

Marshall calls himself a web person and a community activist. He volunteered three years ago to work on the communication committee of Montclair High’s School Action Team for Partnerships (SATp). That role morphed into leadership of the subcommittee charged with creating a new high school website, a position to which he clearly was ideally suited. The website, which launched early this school year, is helping the District meet its objective of upgrading high school communications as outlined in the Strategic Plan. It also helps to address improving technology resources for all students, an objective described in the Equity Innovation Plan announced by the District in August.

Can you remember when you first became interested in computers?

When I was 11 or 12, my father came home with one of the first programmable Monroe calculators. It was the size of a large typewriter. In high school, I learned to program in Fortran. I taught myself by reading programming manuals—and by making lots of mistakes. My high school had a relationship with a nearby company that had an IBM 360 mainframe computer on its premises. Using that computer, I wrote a program that generated class schedules for the teachers and students in my school. In college, I wanted to study computers and the mind. There was no major like that at the time, so I created my own and called it Intelligence and Computation. It included courses in psychology, neurobiology, philosophy, computer science, math, and linguistics. Nowadays those courses make up a fairly common college major known as Cognitive Science.

What was your role as chair of the website committee?

About a year ago, we formed an evaluation committee to look at business proposals sent to us during a request for proposals process. We identified WebDev Studios, partly because the company literally wrote the book on our web platform, WordPress—several titles, in fact, including WordPress for Dummies. The District ultimately hired WebDev to develop the programming for the site.

When it came to content, my first objective was hearing and respecting a variety of views. Montclair being Montclair, there were lots of great ideas. I wanted to be sure we heard from voices that might not typically be the first to speak up. Throughout the process, participants from different parts of the community got to know each other—one of the big benefits of an initiative with many players. To keep the project moving forward, there was a fair amount of coordinating the various and amazing talents people brought to the table. There was a lot of expertise in content creation, editorial, technology, art and visual design, business, budgeting, and process. I saw my roles as maintaining a sense of community-minded-ness, keeping sight of our long-range goals, and getting things done.

What might people not suspect, just by looking at the site, was particularly challenging to pull off?

Normally, an initiative like this would have taken a year or more, but we leveraged the older District website for much of the content. Our biggest challenge was and continues to be pulling together new content. Parent volunteers worked with MHS departments to revise and refresh the material from the old MHS website and to create new material. We want the website to be engaging, especially for MHS students, so we have started adding websites for MHS clubs, teams, and parent groups. The site is organic, changing and, we hope, improving all the time, as websites should do. But that requires a lot of work by volunteers that largely goes unnoticed.

Have you learned anything from this process that readers might find useful in designing their personal websites?

Over the past few years, WordPress has grown in sophistication from a plain blogging system to the most flexible and popular website content system in the world. We saved a ton of money by using existing, open-source software components. And we’ve assembled a platform that is easily and inexpensively customizable.

Information Cortesy of the MPS district, the full interview was e-mailed as part of the districts latest newsletter. Image is as Screenshot of new MHS website.