Courses
I teach educational technology courses. My usual graduate courses
are EDT 666 (no, not the devil in the machine) Instructional Design;
EDT 670 Educational Reform and Technology; EDT 618 Everything an
Educational Technology Coordinator Ever Wanted to Know. I have also
taught EDT 650 World Wide Web Across the Curriculum and EDT 610 -
Introduction to Educational Technology. I also teach the undergraduate
CT 243 Introduction to Educational Technology for pre-service teachers.
If you are interested in those courses, check out the links to the
right. My approach to teaching is to set up interesting settings for
the students to explore within. As we use technoology to dig through
various problems, we talk about what we are doing and what we are
learning along the way.
My research has focused in three rather broad areas. The first is
online performance support tools for both education and industry. I
think we learn best at the exact point of need. So, the best time to
try to teach is when someone needs some information. I build systems
that allow users to add information, tag it in a way that they and
others can find it when they are trying to solve a problem, and
contains communications tools so users can ask and answer questions. I
call these systems Dynamic Online Performance Support Systems or DOPSS.
There are articles about them in my articles section.
My second area, related to the first is the evaluation of
search/retrieval systems. You can read about it in one of the articles
and my dissertation.
My third area of interest is how people learn and how they change
their Practice (al la Cook and Brown). I am currently studying how the
education department is learning to use data driven decision making and
Live Text.
I have spent a lot of time over the past year learning to use Live
Text, a tool for gathering assessment data. Along with this, I have
been learning about data driven decision making, actor network theory,
and activity theory.