I'm Marv Howard — an educational technologist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with a career spent at the intersection of learning, teaching, and technology. Back when that intersection was still a dirt road, and continuing now that it's a highway.
My academic background is genuinely eclectic: a Ph.D. in Education with a specialization in Curriculum and Instructional Technology from Iowa State, along with a Master's in English Literature and dual bachelor's degrees in English and Computer Science. That combination — humanist and technologist in the same body — shapes everything I do. I care as much about why and how people learn as I do about the tools we hand them.
I've spent most of my professional life at the Iowa Area Education Agencies, where I work as an Advanced Learning Technologist and Instructional Developer supporting K–12 districts across Iowa. My work has ranged from facilitating online professional development for inservice teachers to researching how mobile technologies can transform learning in PreK–12 classrooms. Before that, I spent several years teaching and doing research at Iowa State, where I got my first real education in what it actually takes to design learning experiences that hold up.
My research has explored questions I find genuinely interesting: How do teachers assess and integrate technology into their practice? What does good online professional development actually look like? How can mobile learning work in real classrooms, not just in conference presentations? I've presented findings at international conferences and published in SITE proceedings over the years — work I'm proud of, even when the conclusions were messier than I'd hoped.
There is a thread that runs through everything I make, though it took me a while to see it clearly. It connects a novel about constructivist education theory, a collection of Scottish border ballads, and a career spent designing learning environments that give agency to the learner rather than the system. The thread is this: I believe in the power of story to preserve what matters, and in the right of the individual to navigate that story on their own terms.
The Scottish supernatural tradition has held my imagination for as long as I can remember. In 2014, my wife and I made a pilgrimage — from the Howard family seat at Arundel through the ancient sacred landscape of Avebury and Stonehenge, past the Uffington White Horse (which I carry as a tattoo), north through Liverpool to Mauchline in Ayrshire, where her family emigrated to America in 1850, and finally to Aberfoyle. We walked the path to Doon Hill, where Robert Kirk — who in 1691 wrote The Secret Commonwealth, a treatise on the fairy folk of the Scottish Highlands — collapsed one evening in 1692 and did not come back. The local tradition holds that the fairies took him. The photograph on the cover of The Search for Elfland is the path we walked that day.
I've been making things since long before the web existed — systems, courses, stories, software. I worked alongside Don Brown at Microware in the early days, and his Eamon adventure game on the Apple II first made me want to build worlds for the computer. That impulse curved through decades of educational technology and has never entirely gone away.
When I'm not thinking about learning design, I'm probably thinking about live music, science fiction, single malt whisky, or where to travel next.