The Daily Orange

Media Credit: Danielle Carrick

Sitting in front of his 30-inch flat panel computer monitor, next to his laptop and digital clock, Virtual Dave explains how we live in a virtual world. Books are now digital documents just put onto paper. Banks now create virtual identities to keep virtual credit. Libraries are now evolving from bookshelves to online databases.

Despite all of his cyberspace knowledge, Virtual Dave does his best work in reality, as R. David Lankes, an associate professor at the School of Information Studies. His father coined the nickname, Virtual Dave, while Lankes managed a virtual lab as an undergraduate student at Syracuse. It stuck, and that's how the professor greets every visitor to his Web site.

For Lankes, working with technology isn't just his day job. He said evolving technology can change the world and not just in the figurative sense.

"They're nice contained worlds," Lankes said. "So sometimes when you're dealing with really complex, nasty problems - political problems, people problems, things without easy solutions - technology will work if you give it a battery and plug the wire in right. It's a challenge, but you know there's a solution."

Lankes was one of the pioneers of the World Wide Web. When it first emerged, he was part of a team that created one of the first 100 Web sites. The project, called the ERIC Clearinghouse, generated the first Web presence for the Discovery Channel and created some of the first Web content for CNN.

Michael Eisenberg was one of the team members who worked on the ERIC project, now known as the Information Institute of Syracuse (IIS).

Eisenberg, the current dean emeritus of University of Washington's Information School, remembers Lankes coming to work anxious about new ideas or technologies he thought could be utilized. Soon, the two were making regular trips to Washington D.C. to advise the government on how to use technology in schools.

"We taught the U.S. Department of Education in particular about technology, about what was possible," Eisenberg said. "We didn't invent Yahoo! or Google or something like that, but we could have. Dave could have."

While Eisenberg saw potential in Lankes from the start, others did not. Growing up, adults criticized his work ethic. Lankes described high school as the hardest thing he has ever done. He failed to apply himself in classes that he was uninterested in. In chemistry, he had a 95 percent test average but a zero percent homework average. It was classes like these that nearly got him kicked out of school.

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