Paul Velleman, associate professor of social statistics in Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, has been named to receive the 1998 Educom Medal for his "outstanding work developing technology-based programs to improve the teaching and learning of statistics."

The award is given by Educause, a nonprofit consortium of colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations and corporations devoted to encouraging the use of technology in education. It will be presented in October at the Educom 98 conference in Orlando, Florida.

Velleman was nominated for the award by the American Statistical Association (ASA), one of five academic groups chosen by Educom to select this year's winners.

"What the award means to me is that the ASA selected me as the statistician who has made the greatest contribution to statistics education with technology," Velleman said. "We in ILR are world leaders in using technology in teaching statistics. We were among the first to use microcomputers and among the first to use multimedia."

Velleman, who joined the faculty in 1975, helped to pioneer those advances. He was the first teacher to use interactive computing in introductory statistics courses, and installed the first microcomputer lab in ILR.

He created a statistical analysis program for use in his classes called Data Desk¨, now widely used around the world. More recently, he developed ActivStats¨, an interactive CD-ROM textbook for use in introductory statistics courses.

ActivStats includes video of real-world situations in which statistical analysis can be applied, audio-visual lessons on statistics concepts, interactive animations to illustrate abstract statistics ideas, and self-test quizzes, along with a limited version of the Data Desk environment in which students can work with the supplied data. For example, there is a video report on how sea manatees are threatened by powerboats, accompanied by datasets on sea manatee population and powerboat registrations. There are also links to other data sets on the World Wide Web, such as one which lists passengers on the Titanic. ActivStats has won several awards, including one from the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics, and an "Eddy" from MacWorld magazine.

Both Data Desk and ActivStats are published by Addison-Wesley. Velleman has formed a private company, Data Description Inc., to continue development of these and other products.

He also maintains a free, public web site called the Data and Story Library, an archive of 70 real-world datasets in a variety of disciplines, specifically designed for use by people teaching statistics.

Velleman teaches courses ranging from introductory statistics through a graduate course in multivariate methods and advanced data analysis.