Cassell Delivers Keynote at CyberLearning 2015
News
HCII Professor and Associate Vice-Provost for Technology Strategy and Impact Justine Cassell delivered a keynote address at CyberLearning 2015: Connect, Collaborate, and Create the Future, held in late January in Arlington, Va. Organized by SRI International's Center for Innovative Research on CyberLearning (CIRCL), the meeting brought together more than 150 learning and technology research leaders who discussed ways to shape cyberlearning research and development efforts to achieve deep impacts on policy, practice, future research solicitations and products.
In her talk, "Connection Machines: Sociocultural Context in Cyberlearning," Cassell discussed how careful researchers need to be not to ignore a student's social and cultural context when he or she is in a classroom or in front of a cyberlearning system. Specifically, she discussed her research into rapport-building and vernacular usage among students and how they can be applied to virtual peer tutoring programs. "Make sure that when you think about the work you do, that it's not just the brain of the student that you pay attention to — but also that student's involvement with students around him or her, involvement with family and community and context," Cassell said. "None of those things are epiphenomenal. Those are the places where we work. Those are the ways in which we can make difference."
Watch Cassell's full talk here.