Marc Debiase is a Morgantown area native. He grew up in Westover (west over the river) and attended local schools. Like many of us reflecting, he has fond memories of his childhood neighborhoods and has witnessed great changes in the area's landscape as a result of transportation technology and population increase.

PROJECT BACKGROUND AND AUTHOR

"Looking back over many years, change such as we have witnessed during our own time is a relatively new phenomenon. For centuries people had witnessed technological changes and infrastructure expansion, but not as rapidly as we do today, and not to such great degrees. For example, at one time people would travel the world and subsequently return to their childhood homes, usually with little change occurring there during the 19th century. If you leave your hometown for just a year now, chances are when you return home the landscape will have changed."

'I have spoken to people who are 80 years old about Morgantown's history. Mr Ralph Furman was 91 when I used to visit him. He had so many stories about Morgantown. His father had a Blacksmith shop on West Run when horses were the primary source of transportation in Morgantown. If anyone knew about Morgantown and transportation, it was Ralph."

"Among the Morgantown elders, it's the same story; and, I imagine this story began being told about the time of the automobile. Everything has changed! Even though the steamboat and train has had huge impacts on mobility, they did not impact the landscape to the degree the automobile has in Morgantown. The automobile has literally changed everything."

Dr Marc Debiase graduated from West Virginia University. His interests include foreign languages and culture, technology integration inTO educational settings, educational psychology, and instructional systems design.

"Part of what I like to do is researching computer based learning environments. The History of Morgantown project was one aspect of this interest. Creating rich multimedia is important for education today. Today scholars are oriented to hypermedia environments more so at home than in school. School in many ways is still lagging with technology. There is always more we can do, a whole lot more!"

The Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) program developed by the Library of Congress is a program that The History of Morgantown project shares many goals with. The TPS program focuses on bringing Library of Congress digitized multimedia content into classroom teaching. Dr Debiase's goals include TPS and integrating any reliable, legitimate resources such as archived and/or digitized web based multimedia content into the classroom through online instruction.

"Imagine teaching a 'Human Rights' course and supplementing it with news reels of Martin Luther King speeches and other dramatic events that shaped the future of this country. Multimedia is a powerful tool, and it tells a vivid story. We should all utilize multimedia in contemporary educational settings."

Morgantown & American, Transportation: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow was presented at the Association for the advancement of Computing in Education world conference on educational media in summer of 2008 at Vienna, Austria.