People at Science of Collaboration

Current group participants

Brigid Barron

Barron is a developmental psychologist who studies processes of collaborative learning in and out of school. She studies how individuals work together to create joint products and how what is learned and created is related to the quality of their interactions. In a five year NSF supported CAREER award she is documenting adolescents’ learning ecologies (e.g. learning opportunities across home, school, libraries, virtual communities, clubs, camps) for technological fluency development across diverse communities in the Silicon Valley region. This work uses multiple methods to create chronological maps of children’s learning that reveal the evolution of interest based activities and the networks of learning partners that have supported learning in and out of school. The goal of this work is to better understand how to design more equitable opportunities for learning. She co-leads the LIFE center (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments), funded by the National Science Foundation in 2005. Barron is PI for a grant funded by the MacArthur Foundation that will follow students longitudinally as they participate in programs designed to develop their technological fluency through activities such as game design, robotics, and digital movie making. The theoretical goal of this work is to articulate conditions that lead to the diversification of a child’s learning ecology through increasing activity in learning activities across settings. She is currently an Associate Professor of Education at Stanford University. Her work appears in books and journals including Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Human Development, Journal of the Learning Sciences, and Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, International Journal of Technology and Design. She has co-edited a book on the use of video as data in Learning Sciences research.

Heidy Maldonado

Heidy Maldonado is a Doctoral Candidate in Learning Sciences and Technology Design at Stanford University. She holds Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Computer Science, as well as a Master of Arts in Latin American Studies, all from Stanford University. Her research interests include computer supported collaborative learning and work; mobile interface design for learning and collaboration; cross-cultural interface design; design and interaction with embodied expressive computer agents.

Caitlin Martin

Since receiving her Masters from Stanford in 1999 in Learning, Design and Technology, Caitlin has worked at Stanford doing research, assessment, and media design for educational technology projects. She has been the lead in a formative assessment of techonlogy projects funded by the Oracle Education Foundation in local community centers and schools since 2003. Since 2000 she has been the project director of the Bermuda Computing Curriculum project, the design of a project-based programming and multimedia curricula, development and implementation of professional development to support the courses, and research into student learning, interests, experiences, and future plans. Caitlin is also involved in Professor Barron’s learning ecologies research, documenting exemplary technology education tools and practices found in diverse communities. Prior to graduate work she was a graphic designer of children’s books at Farrar, Straus & Giroux in NYC.

Emma Mercier

Emma received her Ph.D. in the Psychological Studies in Education Program at Stanford. Her research focuses on collaborative learning, the interaction patterns that lead to learning and the educational contexts that promote those interactions. She is also interested in technology and fluency equity, and how to create experiences to engage underrepresented populations with technology. She has a MA in Psychology from Edinburgh University.

Véronique Mertl

Véronique Mertl is finishing a doctorate in Human Development and Cognition at the University of Washington. Her research explores the ecology of out-of-school learning contexts and the situated interactions that unfold. Her dissertation investigates collaboration and belongingness for professional and adolescent musicians. Through her research, she is particularly interested in social entrepreneurship as a way to create sustainable practices for adolescents in their passion-driven pursuits. She has worked in music organizations that serve underrepresented youth and was an elementary English teacher in France for several years.

Neema Moraveji

Neema is a second-year doctoral candidate in the Psychological Studies in Education program at Stanford. His research is on large-group collaborative learning technologies. His background is in Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Science. He has a MS degree from Carnegie Mellon University and worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, China. His website has more details about his various interests and projects.

Roy Pea

Roy Pea is Stanford University Professor of the Learning Sciences and Director of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (http://scil.stanford.edu). He has published widely on such topics as distributed cognition, learning and education fostered by advanced technologies including scientific visualization, on-line communities, digital video collaboratories, and wireless handheld computers (http://www.stanford.edu/~roypea). His current work is developing a new paradigm for everyday networked video interactions for learning and communications (http://diver.stanford.edu), and for how informal and formal learning can be better understood and connected, as Co-PI of the LIFE Center (http://life-slc.org) funded by the National Science Foundation as one of several large-scale national Science of Learning Centers. He was co-author of the 2000 National Academy Press volume How People Learn. He founded and served as the first director of the learning sciences doctoral programs at Northwestern University (1991) and Stanford University (2001). He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Education, American Psychological Society, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In 2004-2005, Roy was President of the International Society for the Learning Sciences. He received his doctorate in developmental psychology from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Roy also serves as a Director for Teachscape, a company he co-founded in 1999 that provides comprehensive K-12 teacher professional development services incorporating web-based video case studies of standards-based teaching and communities of learners.

Na’ilah Suad Nasir

Professor Na’ilah Suad Nasir is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. Her research centers on how issues of culture and race influence the learning, achievement, and educational trajectories of African American and other non-dominant students in urban school and community settings. She is interested in the intertwining of social and cultural contexts (cultural practices, institutions, communities, societies) and the learning and educational trajectories of individuals, especially in connection with inequity in educational outcomes. Specific studies have focused on the nature of mathematical thinking and learning for African American students in practices outside of school, such as basketball and dominoes; relations between racial/ ethnic identity and mathematics learning and achievement in a diverse urban high school; and the ways that learning setting support collaborative learning processes for urban students. Professor Nasir received her BA in Psychology and Social Welfare (with a minor in African American Studies) from the University of California, Berkeley, and her MA and PhD in Psychological Studies in Education (with a focus on Human Development) from UCLA. She was the recipient of the Spencer Dissertation Fellowship in 1998, and the Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2002. From 2000 to 2008, she was an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Stanford University, where she won the St. Claire Drake Teaching Award in 2007. In 2006, she won the Early Career Researcher Award from Division G of the American Educational Research Association. Recent work has been published in Anthropology and Education Quarterly, the American Educational Research Journal, and Educational Researcher.

Daniel Steinbock

Daniel studies how people learn to organize, innovate and instigate collaborative practices in communities of practice. He is currently a doctoral candidate in Learning Sciences and Technology Design at Stanford University’s School of Education. His previous degrees include an individually-designed Masters of Science in Design Thinking from the Stanford School of Engineering and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Daniel Stringer

Daniel Stringer’s research investigates youth participation in out-of-school educational programming, with a focus on youth development and community empowerment. Daniel is a Doctoral student in Stanford’s Programs in Learning Sciences and Technology Design and Psychological Studies in Education. Daniel received his B.S. from Stanford in Science, Technology, and Society where he studied contemporary issues in social equity and information technology. Prior to beginning graduate school, Daniel worked for Google in Mountain View, California, and worked in small business development in New Orleans. He as also helped to organize and direct multiple academic enrichment and youth development programs in California and North Carolina.

Sarah Walter

Sarah Walter is currently a doctoral candidate in the Learning Sciences and Technology Design program at Stanford. Her dissertation research is a participant-observation analysis of learning to collaborate in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Specifically, her work focuses on end-game content known as raids: hours-long team activities that involve a great amount of communication and coordination of actions, interdependence of teammates, and formulation and execution of strategy. She has spent two recent summers in production work on The Sims games at Electronic Arts, and two summers helping kids learn how to program their own games. Before Stanford, she received a BS in cognitive science from UCLA, and then worked as an interaction designer for Yahoo!.

Science of Collaboration

People