For the past 10+ years, I've been designing and building social learning environments for the web, with a particular focus on fostering peer-to-peer learning communities. I enjoy sketching out new ideas on napkins, and turning the best of those sketches into working code and living systems.
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I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and recently began working on the Minerva Project. Minerva aims to create the 21st century university for top students around the world. I design and help build Minerva's web-based learning environment. We are currently hiring engineers.
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Prior to Minerva, I was Chief Learning Architect at Grockit, where I led research and development projects: advanced product development, learning analytics projects, ongoing efficacy studies, academic collaborations, and peer-reviewed publications (details). I created Grockit Answers, a Q&A tool designed specifically for educational video, in order to support helpful peer-to-peer interactions around video instruction in a contextually-relevant way.
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In my limited free time, I enjoy working on self-directed software side projects. Most recently, I built Studio Sketchpad as a place for creative coders to write and share interactive Processing visual programs built on top of my derivative of the magical Etherpad editor. I check in daily to find and highlight nice work in the studio gallery. Sketchpad has been used in an educational setting at several excellent art and design schools, including UCLA, NYU/Tisch, and RISD, and also in a P2PU course that I ran in 2010.
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I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Brandeis University in May, 2008. In my dissertation work, I examined the possibilities of motivating learning among peers by incorporating these interactions into a game. This drew on a combination of game theory, system building, and a statistical analysis of elementary school students competing in a spelling competition. My dissertation is available for download.
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