I am an Associate Professor at the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, and a member of the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability (GVU) Center. I received my PhD from the Epistemology and Learning Group at the MIT Media Lab in 1997, and my BA in physics from Harvard University in 1987. I do research on online communities and education, and am the founder of the Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) research group.

My research applies the "constructionist" philosophy of education to the design of online communities. Constructionism advocates learning through design and construction activities -- learning through working on personally meaningful projects. The Internet has a unique potential to make constructionist learning scalable and sustainable in real-world settings, because it makes it easy to provide social support for learning and teaching. In electronic learning communities, participants can help motivate and support one-another's activities. One focus of my current research is studying open-content publishing environments (like Wikipedia) as constructionist learning environments.

I am a member of project Georgia Computes!, an NSF Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) Alliance.

I co-direct Georgia Tech's initiative in Web Science.

I founded the College's Undergraduate Research Opportunities in Computing (UROC) program.

My office is in the Technology Square Research Building (TSRB), room 338. Office hours: email me or just drop by.

My research is funded by the National Science Foundation (grants from the CAREER, ALT, and BPC programs), as well as generous grants from IBM, Intel, Microsoft Research, Neometron, and Ricoh Silicon Valley.