PROJECTS & RESEARCH
2005-Present Co-principal Investigator, Leadership Development for Technology Integration: Developing an Effective NSDL Teacher Workshop Model This
is a three-year NSF project to develop and refine a hybrid workshop
model that supports teachers to integrate National Science Digital
Library (NSDL) resources and technologies into their classrooms with an
immediate goal to directly engage over 1,000 teachers, grades 5-9. The
project is funded by NSF’s NSDL program for $650,000 over the
three-year period.
2003-Present Co-principal Investigator, Virtual Math Teams.
This is a five-year NSF project at the Math Forum that will investigate
the dynamics of online and face-to face collaborative problem solving
and problem creation. The project will seek to identify aspect of good
collaborative problem solving and then design online systems that will
help both students and teachers to create and solve collaborative math
problems. The five year project is funded by two NSF grants. NSDL:
Collaborative Services for the Math Forum Digital Library, $450,000 for
two years. ITR: Catalyzing & Nurturing Online Workgroups to Power
Virtual Learning Communities, $2,299,978 for five years.
2005-2006 Community Evaluation Research, Episcopal Community Services.
Work with ECS began as a collaborative project with ECS, Drexel
University students and two Drexel univeristy faculty member to
evaluate ECS's services to the local Philadelphia Community. The
work evolved beyond the intial evaluation project and grew into an
effort to work with ECS afterschool programs.
2002-2005 Principal Investigator, Online Mentoring Project
An NSF funded project designed to establish an online mentoring system
using the Math Forum’s Problem of the Week environment.
Pre-service Math Teachers will gain skills in mentoring students in an
asynchronous environment. The project will assess the value of
this form of mentoring for helping new teachers focus on how students
learn to think mathematically. The project will demonstrate ways
the Internet and the online resources of the Math Forum can contribute
to teaching pre-service teachers how to mentor students in
mathematics. NSF funded three-year project beginning February 1,
2002, Award Id: 0127516.
2004-2006 Ethnographer, The Concord Model Project,
Project to study the collaborative care model of Dr. Paul Uhlig and his
team at Concord Hospital and other related sites where collaborative
care is used. The project seeks to learn lessons that collaborative
care has to offer and then to seek designs for a Computer Supported
Collaborative Work model that could be generalized to other
settings. Grant funded by Partners Healthcare , Boston, MA
2004-2006 Ethnographic Evaluator, MSPnet,
a Research Evaluation and Technical Assistance (RETA) project of the
NSF’s Math Science Partnership(MSP). MSPnet serves the MSP
community with a website that offers an online presence for MSP project
as well as allowing for community building across projects. Funded by
the NSF’s Math Science Partnership program.
2002-2003 Principal Investigator, Social Activity in the Educational Digital Library: Community Tools and Resources for Learning.
This CILT funded pilot project is designed to create a profile of how
technology supports teachers collaborating around digital library
resources. While both digital libraries and online communities promise
to impact education, the two have been inadequately linked. The project
identifies three types of online sites along a continuum from sites
that are primarily resource collections to sites that are primarily
collaborative with a blended site of resources and interactions in
between. We propose to identify common activity structures occurring in
different site types by surveying a number of online community and
digital library sites and by collecting data on three example sites:
CILTKN (resource collection), TAPPED IN (collaborative) and the Math
Forum (blended). A pre-conference workshop will be held at ICLS in
order to elicit activity structures from other sites and hone measures
for our three-site study. A catalog of user activity structures will be
compiled from the research and posted on the CILT Design Principles
database for other researchers to use and build on.
2002-2005 Evaluator, Math Tools.
This NSF project is creating a digital library of software tools for
learning mathematics for all platforms—computer and handheld .
The vision is to develop a learning community that will share resources
and ideas for learning in a collaborative context. This is a two
year NSDL project for $800,000.
2000-Present Ethnographic Research on Higher Education.
This work is part of an international collaboration between scholars in
the United States, Canada, England, and other parts of Europe to look
at the current set of globalizing pressures on higher education and the
way these pressures affect participants in higher education, faculty,
students and administrators.
1997-2001 Literacy Training and Service-Learning.
Through the Sociology of Education and Literacy coaching course I have
developed an ongoing relationship with CORPP (Community Occupational
Readiness Program and Placement) to use Drexel Students as tutors for
the learners at CORPP who are trying to prepare for the GED or improve
literacy skills for the workplace. This course is a central part
of the service learning program in the sociology major at Drexel.
1996-Pres. Ethnographer, The Math Forum,
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA. The Math Forum has recently
received three years of funding from NSF to continue the work of
providing a forum for the development of an on-line community
supporting teachers and students of mathematics. The grant will
support an evaluation team made up of an educational psychologist and
an ethnographer. My role is to map the virtual community and
assess the ways the Math Forum has fostered the development of new
kinds of social interaction and support.