Research

In addition to the funded projects below, I am supervising a number of dissertation research projects: Micro-blogging in the workplace (Dejin Zhao); Public commenting for student engagement (Honglu Du); Collaborative learning in teachers’ use of information technology (Hansa Sinha); Designing and using APIs (John Daughtry); Online data discovery, integration and analysis by end users (Nan (Bernie) Zang); Giving users control of their online representations (Elizabeth Thiry); and Cross-cultural co-adaptation in computer-supported collaborative work (Na Li).

wConnect: A Developmental Community for Women in IST

In this NSF-sponsored action research project, we are building and studying an online community of young women at different levels of development - high school, university, and professional as they support each other in their education and career goals related to computer and information sciences.

Wireless State College

This community informatics project is sponsored by Intel and The Knight Foundation; it is exploring a variety of community engagement activities that can be supported by local WiFi networks. For example, we collaborated with statecollege.com on a mobile information system for the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, a traditional local event that takes place each summer in State College. We are currently exploring the role of context-aware news feeds, comments, and other content sharing in the Civicinity system.

End-User Web Development

As part of the EUSES Consortium, we are continuing to study issues in end-user programming. Our current work examines the role of advance planning in end-user web programming (Web EUP); gender and other individual differences in Web EUP; and mashups by web-active end users.

Process and Content Common Ground in Collaborative Sense-Making

This ONR-sponsored project has been underway for several years; we have used systematic laboratory studies to track the development of common ground as new teams solve complex problems together. An important distinction is between shared content or information and shared strategies or tactics for how to manage the sharing and decision-making process.

Former (less active) projects

My PhD student Jochen Rode built and evaluated CLICK, an end-user development tool for building simple interactive web applications.

While still at Virginia Tech, I worked with Jack Carroll and others to build MOOsburg, a place-based community network, and related projects like TeacherBridge, an environment for knowledge development and sharing among public school teachers. A general outcome of these and other projects is the Bridgetools software architecture and tool suite that provides seamless support and interleaving of synchronous and asynchronous interaction.

The CommunitySims project was carried out over the last few years I was at Virginia Tech; we studied development of a cross-generational learning community (middle school students and senior citizens) who collaborate on Stagecast Creator visual simulation projects that explored a range of community issues.

For many years I studied and built tools for people learning and using Smalltalk, an object-oriented language and environment. One set of tools I built was called the Scenario Browser, an approach to middle-out development organized around user scenarios.