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On Synchronicity
ELearn-2009
Game Mechanics
IEG@AIED-2009
PoliticsDaily Q&A
July 2009
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Since July 2008, I have been working at Grockit, a San Francisco web startup focused on bringing live collaborative learning online, where I head our research-grounded, experiment-driven approach to R&D. I've published portions of this work at the E-Learn and the AI in Education conferences, and I occasionally post about ongoing projects on the Grockit blog. PoliticsDaily recently published a piece highlighting our approach at Grockit, based on an email correspondence that I had with the author.
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Dissertation
May 2008
Boston Globe article
August 2004
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I completed my PhD in Computer Science at Brandeis University in May, 2008. A bit about my dissertation research: In classroom-based studies, peer tutoring has proved to be an effective learning strategy, both for the tutees and for their peer tutors.
In seeking to translate the successes of peer-assisted learning from the classroom to the Internet, one major hurdle to overcome is that of motivation.
In my dissertation work, I examined the possibilities of motivating learning among peers by incorporating these interactions into a game. Games offer a valuable set of tools and techniques for affecting student participation, engagement, goals, and strategies.
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SpellBEE intro
AIED-2005
BEEweb intro
ITS-2006
Evaluating Difficulty
EDM@AIED-2007
Assessing Learning
AIED-2007
Using Expectations
TechReport-2008
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In order to experiment with the real-world effects of game-based peer learning activities, I built SpellBEE. SpellBEE is a web-based game in which pairs of players engage in a two-person English language spelling activity. Since it was first released four years ago, thousands of students have actively participated. The SpellBEE activity later inspired and informed the development of
the BEEweb, a larger suite of synchronous, collaborative learning activities based on the same motivational structure as SpellBEE. Today, the BEEweb platform currently hosts PatternBEE, MoneyBEE, and GeograBEE, and more activities are currently in development.
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Coevolutionary failures
AAAI Symposium-2005
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Earlier in graduate school, while doing work on Evolutionary Computation, I examined methods for monitoring success and failure in coevolutionary algorithms. I developed the Coevisualizer environment for developing, experimenting with, and comparing coevolutionary algorithms on a variety of domains.
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Apple Hacks
O'Reilly, 2008
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I've released an assortment of other (Mac OS X) applications over the past few years. Among these,
Page Axe was designed to enable true data privacy for hosted web applications, and
Berry (userbase: 1) let me leverage the functionality on my home computer from my very low-tech cell phone.
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2004 hike
summer solo
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I have a few albums online with pictures from travels and
hiking trips over the past few years.
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Blog
