L. Kirk Hagen is Professor of Humanities at the University of Houston-Downtown. He began working with computer-based instruction in 1986 at the PLATO labs in Urbana, Illinois. The Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations system is generally recognized to be the world's first comprehensive educational software initiative.

Dr. Hagen's first software project was the French Verb Tutor in 1993, which was released through the Intellimation Library for the Macintosh out of Santa Barbara, California, in 1993. His research on computer-assisted instruction has been presented at the Ninth International Conference on Technology and Education (Paris, 1992), at the Institut Industriel de Transfert de Technologie, the Ninth International Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning in Urbana (1995), and at the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium's symposium in Albuquerque in 1996.

In 1999, Dr. Hagen released his second major software title, Spanish for Business Professionals. SBP was the result of a $171,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education for the development of an interactive, intelligent, multimedia Spanish-language CD-ROM series.

Not long after, Dr. Hagen's research changed directions, and he became a contributer to Skeptic magazine. Over the next seven year, he published seven articles for Skeptic on a variety of topics, including suggestopedia, 9-11 conspiracy theories, and creationism. His research has also appeared in the ADFL Bulletin, La revue canadienne de langues vivantes, the Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium Journal, and most recently in Evolutionary Psychology.

In October 2008, Dr. Hagen published Second language acquisition: an evolutionary linguistics approach with the University of Michigan Press. He currently lives in Cypress, Texas.

Embedded LiveCode

This web site includes some samples of a few LiveCode projects that incorporate streaming audio and video playback and interactive instructional applications with error-specific feedback. LiveCode programming can be used to create computer-based tests for teaching and assessment, computer-adaptive testing, kiosks and even e-portfolios for artists.

You are invited to visit the portfolio page to see a few samples of software solutions. To view the samples, download the new LiveCode plug-in from RunRev, Ltd. and install it on your computer. It's free, fast, easy and versatile, and brings industry-standard interactivity to your web browser. On most Internet connections, the entire download and installation process takes about two minutes. Embedded LiveCode applets run on most popular web browsers, including Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari.