My work centers on unpacking and understanding collective cognition in order to design & evaluate social learning technologies. This means I evaluate learning and the quality of discourse in various socio-technical environments. One of my most recent studies examines a virtual learning community established in Yammer: microsoft's version of facebook for professional settings. I am presenting a paper here at ICLS on Thurs, where I and a coleague (Sean Goggins) analyze the utility of this environment paired with a mentoring model that aims to shift responsibility for moderating Yammer from the instrcutor to the students. In this paper we merge social network analysis with communication analysis in order to determine whether there is evidence that such a method can lead to the development of an effective learning community.

I was am senior researcher working with the Center for Online Innovations in Learning and is also graduate faculty in the College of Information Sciences untill the end of the month and then I will be an assistant professor in the College of Education at Penn State in the Learning, Design, and Technology program. I am a member of the International Society of the Learning Sciences, the American Educational Research Association, and the Association for Computing Machinery. My current research focuses on unpacking and improving cognition through the use of technology and designing software to support complex collaborative problem-solving tasks.