Dr. Anderson is the Director of the School of Media Arts & Design. He is interested in communication technology and the development of content for a variety of platforms, delivery methods and devices. He is an author of a recently released textbook entitled Exploring Electronic Media: Chronicles & Challenges from Blackwell Publishing in which he chronicles the historical development of electronic media technology and examines the current state of both traditional (radio, television, cable) and new media technologies & applications.

Over the past several years, Dr. Anderson has developed applications utilizing web standards, CSS, video streaming and database-driven web sites using the PHP scripting language and MySQL relational database. He is currently intrigued by applications that allow users to customize and contribute to content such as Wikis, blogs, RSS feeds and YouTube. He admits to being mystified by the popularity of social networking, though he dabbles with Facebook and MySpace as an "academic" exercise. He thinks the greatest software invention of the 21st century is Google Earth and on occasion shares his Google Earth placemarks with others via the Google Earth Community.

Anderson was the 2004-2005 President of the Broadcast Education Association (BEA), the association for electronic media professors and industry professionals based in Washington, D.C. He served as the convention program chair for BEA2000, the international conference of the association held in Las Vegas in April of 2000. He has also chaired the Production Aesthetics & Criticism Division, co-chaired the BEA Creative Activities Task Force and served on the BEA Multimedia Task Force. The Creative Activities Task Force led to the development of the BEA Festival of Media Arts, an event which he produced for the first three years of its history.

Anderson has received numerous national awards for his multimedia and video work and has published across a broad range of journals, both academic and trade. Before coming to JMU, Dr. Anderson was on the faculty at the University of Oklahoma, where he served as the Sequence Coordinator for the Broadcasting & Electronic Media Sequence.

Prior to entering academe, Anderson was the environmental reporter and weekend weathercaster for KCNC television, a network O&O station in Denver, Colorado where he worked between 1982 and 1989. He also worked as a news photographer, weathercaster and news reporter at stations in Fresno, California and Fargo, North Dakota.

Teaching Interests: Communication Technologies, Networked Multimedia, Broadcast Journalism

Research/Creative Activities: Web Standards & CSS, Database-Driven Web Sites, Streaming Video Applications