Roundtable Participant: Steve Olson, Writer

MR. OLSON: As Adam said, I'm a writer. I'm not really an education writer. Sometimes I wish I were. I write about a very broad range of subjects, books and magazine articles for the most part. And all of those things that I write tend to have some part of education in them. My last book was about a math competition, and so I had a chapter about math education.

So, I think of myself as kind of a naive user of education research. What I do as a writer is I have to drop into many different fields, and quickly get up to speed in that particular field. So, it will be education one day, and anthropology the next day, physics the next day.

But I think I sort of make up for my lack of expertise in any given subject area by knowing how to do research. I know how to find databases, how to do searches, how to get to libraries to get the information I need. So, I think of myself -- even though the job I have is completely unique -- as sort of a representative user of the education research.