Advisory Board

Brigid Barron, Associate Professor, School of Education, Stanford University

Brigid 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. This work uses multiple methods to create chronological maps of children's learning that reveal the evolution of interest based activities and the networks of learning partners that have supported learning in and out of school. A major goal of this work is to better understand how to design more equitable opportunities for learning.

She is also involved in a multi-year research and development project that designs and studies high school level project-based computer science courses (see http://bermuda.stanford.edu). This university-school collaboration builds on her earlier research in problem and project-based learning and a goal of the research is documenting non-traditional learning outcomes such as increases in the diversity of learning resources students access and their knowledge sharing with community members. 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. email

Richard Beckwith, Research Psychologist, Intel Research, People and Practices Research Group

Richard Beckwith is a Research Psychologist with Intel's People and Practices Research group. Prior to joining Intel, Beckwith was a Research Faculty member at Northwestern University, focusing on research in support of technology design. Before that, he was a Research Scientist at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in Developmental and Educational Psychology from Columbia University. Beckwith has taught courses in qualitative methods, language acquisition, and theories of human development as well as conducted various seminars. His recent research on the topic of what must be done in order to enable ubiquitous computing was presented at Pervasive Computing 2005. email

Carol Coletta, President and CEO, CEOs for Cities

Carol Coletta consults with city governments to develop programs that foster urban community and hosts the nationally syndicated radio show, Smart City. She brings expertise in urban innovation and communication with urban leaders. Previously, she served as president of Coletta & Company in Memphis. In addition, she served as executive director of the Mayors' Institute on City Design, a partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts, U.S. Conference of Mayors and American Architectural Foundation. Carol was a Knight Fellow in Community Building for 2003 at the University of Miami School of Architecture and is currently a candidate for a Master of Design Methods at the Institute of Design at IIT. She is frequently interviewed as an expert on urban issues by national media and is an active speaker on the success formula for cities and creative communities. This year she was named one of the world's 50 most important urban experts by a leading European think tank. email

Steve Dietz, Artistic Director, ZERO1: the Art and Technology Network

Steve Dietz is Artistic Director of ZERO1: the Art and Technology Network and the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge, which he also directed the inaugural event of, along with the ISEA2006 Symposium August 7-13, 2006 in in San Jose, California. He is the former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996, the online art Gallery 9 and digital art study collection. He also co-founded, with the Minneapolis Instite of Arts the award-winning educational site ArtsConnectEd, and the artist community site mnartists.org with the McKnight Foundation.

Dietz has organized and curated new media exhibitions, including Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net (1998); Shock of the View: Artists, Audiences, and Museums in the Digital Age (1999); Digital Documentary: The Need to Know and the Urge to Show (1999); Cybermuseology for the Museo de Monterrey (1999); Art Entertainment Network (2000); Outsourcing Control? The Audience As Artist for the Open Source Lounge at Medi@terra (2000); Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace (2001-02); a nationally traveling exhibition; Open_Source_Art_Hack (2002), with Jenny Marketou, at the New Museum, New York City; Translocations (2003), part of "How Latitudes Become Forms" at the Walker Art Center; State of the Art: Maps, Games, Stories, and Algorithms from Minnesota at the Carleton Art Gallery (2003); Database Imaginary (2004), with Anthony Kiendl and Sarah Cook, Walter Philips Gallery, Banff Center for the Arts; Fair Assembly, web-based projects for Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (2005), with Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; The Art Formerly Known As New Media (2005), with Sarah Cook, Walter Philips Gallery, Banff Centre; Container Culture (2006), with Deborah Dormer-Lawler, Zhang Ga, Alice Ming Wei Jim, Gunalan Nadarajan, Ellen Pau, Johan Pijnappel, Soh Yeong Roh, Yukiko Shikata at the 01SJ Festival; Edge Conditions (2006), at the San Jose Museum of Art; and selected projects for the Ingenuity Festival in Cleveland, Ohio, July 19-22, 2007. The 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge will take place June 4-8, 2008.

He speaks and writes extensively about new media, and his interviews and writings have appeared in Parkett, Artforum, Flash Art, Design Quarterly, Spectra, Salmagundi, Afterimage, Art in America, Museum News, BlackFlash, Public Art Review, Else/Where and Intelligent Agent; in exhibition catalogs for Walker Art Center, Centro Parago, Site Santa Fe, San Francisco Art Institute, and aceart; and in publications from MIT Press, University of California Press, and Princeton University Press.

He has taught about curating and digital art at California College of the Arts, Carleton College, the University of Minnesota, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Prior to the Walker Art Center, Dietz was founding Chief of Publications and New Media Initiatives at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and editor of the scholarly journal, American Art. email

Joseph Dominic, Head of the Heinz Endowments' education granting program

Funds many educational partnerships around technology. As program director, his primary focus is improving teacher quality and principal leadership, enhancing children's early success in core skills, and providing a choice of schools to underprivileged families and youth. He is an advisor to professional groups and organizations that directly support the work of educators in their communities. He also serves as the primary contact with colleges and universities for grant making across the Endowments' programs. He has been a team member for Carnegie Mellon University's Departmental Review program, and is currently board chairman of a federal research and development education laboratory at Temple University in Philadelphia. On the national level, he has been co-chairman of Grantmakers for Education, a major association for foundations that work in education. In 2004, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette named him one of the top five contributors to education progress in the region, and the University of Pittsburgh's chapter of Phi Delta Kappa named him Lay Education Leader of the Year. Joe earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and education and a master's and doctorate in critical literary studies from Michigan State University. email

David Driskell, Chair, Growing Up In Cities Project, Cornell University

David Driskell is the UNESCO Chair for "Growing Up in Cities" in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. He is interested in how young people can be meaningful partners in development, both to create more equitable, livable and sustainable cities and to foster skills for active democracy and environmental stewardship. He is author of Creating Better Cities with Children and Youth (UNESCO/Earthscan, 2002) as well as numerous articles; teaches courses on community-based planning and action research; and directs action research initiatives in partnership with community-based organizations, most recently in New York and Nairobi. He is also a practicing planner and a principal in the Community Planning Collaborative of Ithaca, New York. His professional and scholarly work has received awards from the American Planning Association, the Environmental Design Research Association, and the American Society of Landscape Architects. David is a graduate of Stanford University and MIT. email

Kimberly Gomez, Associate Professor, College of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago

Kimberley Gomez, Associate Professor of Literacy and Learning Sciences, is a learning sciences researcher whose research efforts are focused on helping children of color experience more equitable opportunities to learn in K-12 urban public schools. At the center of her research and design efforts is the support of literacy to achieve equity which is reflected in three interrelated lines of work: (1) access to rigorous, state of the art learning materials that meet students' literacy and language needs and scaffold and transform their learning; (2) access to engaging and motivating learning environments; (3) interaction with teachers who have knowledge, training, and skills that can meet literacy and learning needs.

Her currently funded research projects include a study of the relationship between reading achievement and science achievement in 9th-11th graders in urban high schools and an analysis of charter school instructional models, with a particular focus on reading instruction and technology integration plans, in gentrifying communities in Chicago. Her work has appeared in the Linguistics and Education, Phi Delta Kappan, the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Education and Urban Society, and The Journal of Negro Education. Her edited volume "The Work of Language in Multicultural Classrooms: Talking Science, Writing Science (Routledge/Erlbaum) will be published in June, 2008. email

Maja Matarić, Founding Director, Center for Robotics & Embedded Systems, USC

Maja Matarić is a professor of Computer Science and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, founding director of the USC Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (cres.usc.edu), co-director of the USC Robotics Research Lab (robotics.usc.edu), Senior Associate Dean for Research in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the immediate past president of the USC faculty and the Academic Senate. She received her PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from MIT in 1994, MS in Computer Science from MIT in 1990, and BS in Computer Science from the University of Kansas in 1987. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and recipient of the Okawa Foundation Award, NSF Career Award, the MIT TR100 Innovation Award, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, the USC Viterbi School of Engineering Service Award and Junior Research Award, the Provost's Center for Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship, and is featured in the documentary movie "Me & Isaac Newton." She is an associate editor of three major journals and has published extensively in various areas of robotics. Prof. Matarić is actively involved in K-12 outreach, having received federal and corporate grants for developing free curricular materials for elementary and middle-school robotics courses in order to engage student interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) topics. Her Interaction Lab's research into socially assistive robotics is aimed at endowing robots with the ability to help people through individual assistance (for convalescence, rehabilitation, training, and education) and team cooperation (for habitat monitoring and emergency response). Research details are found at http://robotics.usc.edu/interaction/. email

Dale McCreedy, The Franklin Institute

Directs programs in family learning and is a leader in the areas of gender equity and impact research on community programs. She is Director of the Gender and Family Learning Programs Department at The Franklin Institute. Over the last 18 years, she has pioneered the development of science museum program structures and resources to encourage girls and young women in science through collaboration with local and national partner organizations. She is also the Program Director of four NSF-funded collaborations, two with Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., one with the School District of Philadelphia, and one with the Institute for Learning Innovation. She has led the development of program structures and resources, as well as collaborations with local and national partner organizations. These projects garnered $7 million in support from public and private. As an advocate for lifelong learning, with a focus on girls and women?s science learning, Dr. McCreedy participates on numerous advisory boards and girl-based organizations, and makes frequent presentations about girls, women and families in science. She was awarded a lifetime membership in Girl Scouting in 1996, and was the 2002 recipient of the Maria Mitchell Women in Science Award. She received a Ph.D. in education from the University of Pennsylvania. email

Diane Miller, St. Louis Science Center, Education Programs

Develops and leads community outreach programs focusing on urban audiences. She is the Senior Vice President of School and Community Programs and Partnerships at the Saint Louis Science Center. Her overall responsibilities include initiating, developing, coordinating, and implementing STEM programs and collaborative projects with schools community-based organizations, underserved audiences, interns, and youth. Working with schools and community-based organizations, she is responsible to develop strategies that increase the involvement of audiences not usually reached by the Saint Louis Science Center. Miller was the project director and program developer for two YouthALIVE! grants, one for the California Science Center (formerly the California Museum of Science and Industry) and one for the Saint Louis Science Center. She was a member of the YouthALIVE! steering committee and responsible for co-planning and co-facilitating national network meeting. Currently she is PI on two NSF grants and Co-PI on two additional NSF grants. A main focus of her job is to design and management of programs that utilize the environment and galleries of the Saint Louis Science Center, and development of comprehensive inviting curriculum that nurtures and interest in science, technology, engineering, and math. Miller holds a BA in English from the California State University at Chico and is currently pursing a Masters in Museums Studies at the University of Missouri—St Louis. email

Stewart Tansley, Senior Research Program Manager in External Research & Programs at Microsoft Research Corporation

Conducts robotics research and champions robotics in education. He is responsible for academic partnerships in Robotics research and Sensor Networks research as part of External Research & Programs in Microsoft Research. Before joining Microsoft in 2001, he spent 13 years in the telecommunications industry in software research and development, focusing on technology transfer. Stewart has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence applied to Engineering from Loughborough University, UK. He has published a variety of papers on robotics for education, artificial intelligence and network management, several patents, and has co-authored a book on software engineering for artificial intelligence applications. email