Dr. Kenneth G. Schweller

schweller@bvu.edu

Professor of Computer Science and Psychology

Buena Vista University, Storm Lake Iowa

B.A - Wesleyan University

M.A. and Ph.D. - University of Illinois
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.

- Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance-

Visit Ken's class room site on Second Life where students in his 'Artifical Intelligence', 'Internet Programming' and 'First Year Seminar' classes work on projects. Check out the working Turing Machine, Perceptron and chat bots. Check out the Computer History Museum.
Check out ' Robo Bonobo I ' and 'Robo Bonobo II' - robots Ken and his students are building for apes to use at the Great Ape Trust see "Making a Case for Second Life at the Great Ape Trust"
Check out the TURING MACHINE - a program written by Ken and his students that won a $75,000 prize in SUN MicroSystems JAVA programming contest. (And see the version on Second Life..)
Ken is the 1996 winner of the $18,000 Buena Vista University Wythe Award for excellence in teaching.
hwired.gif (13777 bytes) Outline of "High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs" University of Michigan Press, 1997.  Contains a chapter by Ken.
bots.gif (5721 bytes) AndrewLeonard's book Bots devotes a chapter or so to College Town's MrChat programmed by Ken
theater.gif (4654 bytes) Stephan Schrum's book Theater in CyberSpace contains a chapter by Ken on 'Staging a Play in the MOO Theater'
* Check out the article about College Town in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Ask a Scientist! - BVU experts tackle your science questions!
imslogo.gif (8254 bytes) Check out the IMS Global Learning Consortium which is dedicated to 'designing the future of Global Distributed Learning'. Ken spent a year in D.C. working at Blackboard helping architect the original 0.5 Spec. 

My usual Courses

  • Theory of Compilers
  • Assembly Language Programming
  • Intro to Artificial Intelligence
  • Internet Programming
  • Programming Languages
  • Interfacing the Web
  • Computer Science I and II

Selected Publications

Schweller, K.G.  Staging a Play in the MOO Theater, in Theatre in Cyberspace: Issues of Teaching,
    Acting and Directing, ed. Stephen A. Schrum, Peter Lang Publ., American University Studies,
    Series XXVI, Theatre Arts, Vol. 28, 1999.

Schweller, K.G.  MOO Educational Tools, in High Wired: On the Design, Use and Theory of Educational Moos, eds. Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik. Foreward by Sherry Turkle, University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Schweller, K.G. The Block Pile: A Concrete Example of an Abstract Data Type. Computer Science Education, Vol. 2, #1, 1991.

Schweller, K.G. & Plagman, A.L. Neural Nets and Alphabets: Introducing Students to Neural Networks. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 1989, Vol. 21.

Schweller, K.G. Scheduling Concurrent Procedures using Modula-2. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 1989, Vol. 20.

Schweller, K.G., Brewer, W.F., & Dahl D.A. Memory for Illocutionary and Perlocutionary Effects of
     Utterances. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1976, 15, 325-337.