Women Who Inspire Us
Internet

Annie Valva

Annie Valva is director of technology for WGBH Interactive, the leading PBS broadcasting station from Boston. At WGBH she co-directs a team of 70 people who produce the web sites for PBS programming including This Old House, NOVA, The American Experience, Masterpiece Theater, ZOOM, Arthur, and Between the Lions.

Valva is currently exploring how emerging content models may be optimized for formal and informal educational purposes. Her focus is in the areas of convergence, datacasting, and building scenarios for multiple distribution of digital and analog assets with broadband streaming distribution, digital television transmission, and DVD technologies. And she recently produced a functional prototype for Enhanced Arthur which utilizes camera input devices and on-screen activities to emulate how interactive television can increase literacy and promote active viewing habits.

Before joining WGBH five years ago, Valva worked as a typographer, digital artist, photographer, and systems manager in California companies, including IBM, Tandem Computers, and MetaDesign in San Francisco. She has helped produce various interactive CD-ROMS and educational laser disks.

Valva has served on the Apple Customer Advisory Board for Apple Computer and she currently serves on the Technology Advisory Committee for the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has also given numerous presentations and workshops to all levels of corporate management and employees, elected officials, technical and creative teams, K-12 teaching staff, and institutions of higher education. Her most recent talk was as a keynote speaker at the QuickTime Live Conference in Beverly Hills.

She received her masters degree in educational technology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and has also done research in the MIT Media Lab.