Bonnie Thurber, the founding director of the iCollaboratory has worked with students online since 1989. Her major interest is building Online Collaborative Learning Environments for K-20.

April 1, 2008, Bonnie joined Northwestern University's Research and Academic Technologies (ART) and has quickly become an integral part of the Faculty Support Services team.

Before joining ART, Bonnie was responsible for programs and professional development at the Collaboratory Project where she worked with K-12 teachers and administrators to support teachers as they created and managed engaging, standards-aligned, collaborative projects for their students using the Collaboratory. Bonnie also developed and facilitated online courses, presentations and workshops.

While at the Collaboratory, she initiated the Sponsored Projects program. The first project, "Kid-made Toys" had 600 student participants. Her final Sponsored Project, "National Poetry Month," had 6000 K-12 student participants. She is now bringing them back in the iCollaboratory!

For the past five years, Bonnie has instructed an Online Writing Workshop course as part of the Center for Talent Development Gifted Learning Links Program. Bonnie co-authored a book, Literacy Learning in Networked Classrooms: Using the Internet with Middle Level Students, based on what was learned from her online writing workshop.

Bonnie has served as president of the Illinois Computing Educators, Co-chair of the NECC 2001, the National Educational Computing Conference, and an ISTE Board member. She is currently on the Board of Directors of Kidlink, a Global Network for Youth.

In her Pre-NU life, Bonnie was a tenured Faculty Member at National-Louis University in the National College of Education. In her pre-Chicago life, Bonnie lived in the San Francisco Bay Area where she was a classical Ballet dancer and teacher and a mother of two children.

Bonnie likes to travel and has presented at numerous conferences in person and via video conferencing in North America, South America, Europe and Asia. She also likes to swim, read books, develop data driven web pages, support Collaboratory users, go to movies and talk online with local and international friends.