PDA 2006 Election Video
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February 13, 2006-- Dr. Robert Kozma lives in San Francisco and has been a member of PDA since the January 2005 PDA Summit in Washington D.C. He started his political activism in the 1960s as a member of the Student Peace Union at the University of Michigan, where he was an undergraduate. For the past 12 years, he has worked with the Democratic Party's grassroots. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Bob and his wife, Shari Malone, co-directed an effort to mobilize their fellow San Franciscans to work with Democratic grassroots efforts in the swings states of Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to defeat Bush. In the wake of the Bush victory, Bob rededicated himself to working on national and grassroots efforts to advance the progressive agenda. Along with his San Francisco swing state colleagues he formed DemocracyAction which became the San Francisco Chapter of the PDA and a chartered club of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee. When he joined PDA, he volunteered to chair the Education Task Force and is a member of the new post-Katrina PDA New Orleans project. He also worked with DemocracyAction and the Central Committee to establish a permanent precinct structure in the city and he serves as the Democratic precinct captain in his neighborhood.
Bob is semi-retired and is Emeritus Director, Principal Scientist, and Fulbright Senior Specialist at the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, where he has worked for the past 12 years. Before that, he was a professor and research scientist on the faculty of the University of Michigan for 20 years. He started his professional career as an elementary school teacher in Detroit's inner city. His expertise is in educational technology policy and education reform in support of economic and social development. He has consulted with the Ministries of Education in Egypt, Thailand, Singapore, Norway, and Chile and with Intel Corp., the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Ford Foundation on the use of technology to improve educational systems and support development. He has authored or co-authored more than 75 articles, chapters, encyclopedia entries, and books on education technology. Most recently, he and Shari volunteered in African rural villages, where they spent a month last year with the Millennium Villages Project, a component of the UN Millennium Project at Columbia University. Shari, a retired real estate broker, worked on issues related to micro-financing of women's small businesses while Bob visited community media centers in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda and worked with villagers to explore the role that technology can play in poverty reduction and community development.
Editor's note: Bob has been an important part of PDA since our first encounter. While instrumental in bringing on his chapter in the San Francisco area, Bob is PDA's first sustaining member and has done an exceptional job as Chair of the Education Task Force. Bob is a great example of progressive politics at work and we are fortunate to have him. For more information on Bob, please visit his website.
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