I taught ESOL in the States and abroad for many years while pursuing a variety of interests concerning second-language acquisition issues with grants from sources such as Apple computer, IBM, and the Exxon Educational Foundation.  I have consulted on multimedia projects for Microsoft, Annenberg, USAID, HIID, Fulbright, Kodak, Polaroid, the National Captioning Institute, WGBH-TV, Ministries of Education, and have served on more than a dozen advisory boards. 

After 25 years at Harvard University, first as Associate Director for Research and Program Development of the Programs of ESL, and then as lecturer at the Graduate School of Education, I now direct Anne Dow Associates, a consulting firm that does English language and technology consulting as well as multimedia materials development. 

My interests include ways exploratory learning tools can be integrated into language acquisition activities or other educational contexts outside of the classroom.  Since my first patent in 1976, the prototypes I've developed include a system that records and displays patterns of classroom discourse in real time, talking card games and board games, and, in 1991, lexical search system that let users locate and play segments automatically by typing a word or phrase from the sound track of a video. Recently, I created a musical staircase in my home.