SRI on Tapped In, Educational Networking, and the Future

Part of the Future of Education interactive interview series.

Date: Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am GMT (next day) (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tinyurl.com/futureofed. The Elluminate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event.
Event Page: http://www.futureofeducation.com/forum/topics/sri-on-tapped-in-educational

Judi Fusco and Patti Schank from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) join us to talk about the Tapped In network, educational social networking, and the future of electronic communities in education:

1. What is the difference between community and social networking?
2. What does community brings to the learning process (e.g., Communities of Practice and how that guided their work in Tapped In)? What are examples of successes and what have different organizations/small groups have achieved?
3. Ho do we create community in online situations?
4. How do we understand what the community gives to the participants?

Dr. Judith Fusco is a research scientist in SRI International's Center for Technology in Learning, and specializes in researching and developing online communities, technologies, and resources. Since 1998, she has directed the community development of TAPPED IN, an online community for teacher professional development. While developing the community, she has worked with master teachers from all over the world; and organizations like, NCREL, PBS, Pepperdine University, and Los Angeles County Office of Education. She has helped grow Tapped In from 300 teachers to over 20,000 and has helped many organizations learn to work online.

Dr. Fusco's research on the community involves examining social and technical supports necessary for online community, individual and group readiness, investigating models for online professional development, understanding the nature of local K-12 education communities of practice, generally analyzing and applying social network analysis (SNA) techniques to quantitative data gathered in the community. In addition, she is part of the OERL (Online Evaluation Research Library) team. She is co-leading the evaluation of the OERL web site and working with professors to investigate how OERL might be used in graduate level evaluation courses.

Before coming to SRI International, she worked at Apple Computer, Inc. leading the community development of Convomania, on an online community for kids who are sick or have a disability. The community of Convomania ended in January of 1998, so Dr. Fusco, Teresa Middleton (CTL alum) and others formed the online community PatchWorx, a 501c3 non-profit organization for kids who are sick or have a disability.

For more, see http://ctl.sri.com/people/displayPerson.jsp?Nick=jfusco

Patricia Schank is a cognitive and computer scientist at SRI's Center for Technology in Learning. Her current research interests are human computer interaction (HCI), social computing, computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL), and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). Working with teams of developers and researchers, she applies a range of design and engineering processes (interface design, prototyping, user testing, architecture specification, and implementation) and research methodologies to develop and analyze innovative socio-technical environments. Dr. Schank has a Ph.D. in education (emphasis in cognition and learning) and an M.S. in computer science (emphasis in artificial intelligence) from the University of California at Berkeley, where her dissertation work focused on modeling and aiding scientific reasoning through an integration of theory-based cognitive simulations, experimental studies, and instructional curricula.

For more, see http://ctl.sri.com/people/displayPerson.jsp?Nick=schank