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 with the goal of understanding 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 new 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 is currently co-editing a book on the use of video as data in Learning Sciences research.

Shelley Goldman

Shelley Goldman is an educational anthropologist who has been an elementary teacher and director of an alternative, inner-city middle school. She is interested in the idea that learning takes place when students are actively engaged with each other and their teachers in conversations and activities related to real-life problem solving. Her interest in how people learn in and out of school has led her to study the effects that computer networks, simulations and collaboration have on communication patterns. Professor Goldman is the Director of the LDT Program.

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.

Dan Schwartz

Daniel Schwartz worked for eight years as a secondary school teacher in Kenya, the inner-city of Los Angeles, and a Native Alaskan village before returning to school to earn his PhD in Human Cognition and Learning. His research examines how people move from untutored mental models to more formal and verbal understanding in the domains of mathematics, physics, and biology. His work employs laboratory and computer-modeling methodologies, as well as classroom interventions that involve the use of instructional software programs that he has authored including STAR.Legacy, the Hypothesis Visualizer, and Teachable Agents.

John Willinsky

"After working for some time on the educational implications of such knowledge systems as literary theory, historical dictionaries, and European imperialsim, I have come to focus on both analyzing and altering scholarly publishing practices to understand whether this body of knowledge might yet become more of a public resource for learning and deliberation." Until 2007 he was the Pacific Press Professor of Literacy and Technology and Distinguished University Scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Jeremy Bailenson

Jeremy Bailenson's main area of interest is the phenomenon of digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality. He explores the manner in which people are able to represent themselves when the physical constraints of body and veridically-rendered behaviors are removed. Furthermore, he designs and studies collaborative virtual reality systems that allow physically remote individuals to meet in virtual space, and explores the manner in which these systems change the nature of verbal and nonverbal interaction.

Hebert H. Clark

Herbert H. Clark (Psychology) is interested in language use, especially in conversation and other forms of dialogue. He and his students have carried out a series of studies on how people collaborate with each other in using language in a variety of joint activities. They have also studied language use in other media. Much of this work is represented in two recent books, Arenas of Language Use(1992), and Using Language (1996). He has also worked on speech disfluencies and their role in managing conversation.

Pamela Hinds

Pamela Hinds (Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management) studies the interplay between information technologies, information sharing, and human judgment, as a core faculty member of the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization. She is currently conducting research on the affect of remote and distributed work on employees’ shared understanding of work, the affect of intellectual property agreements on information sharing, and the limitations of expertise.

Clifford Nass

Clifford Nass (Associate Professor of Communications) is co-director with Byron Reeves of the project on Social Responses to Communication Technologies. In a series of experiments over the past few years, they and their students have explored the ways in which people incorporate elements of human social conduct into the way they respond to computers and communication technologies. Their theories have been applied by a wide range of companies in the design of computer interfaces using agents and incorporating voice technologies.

Byron Reeves

Byron Reeves (Professor of Communication) is co-director with Clifford Nass of the project on Social Responses to Communication Technologies, with special interest in the psychological processing of media in the areas of attention, memory, emotions, and physiological responses. They have co-authored a book describing results of their research, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Televisions, and New Media Like Real People and Places (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).