Andrea Forte
I'm a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. I am working toward a degree in human-centered computing with a focus on social computing and learning sciences.
After obtaining my MLIS in 1998, I worked for a few years as an interaction designer with a small interface design studio in Austin, Texas. Today my research interests lie at the convergence of learning sciences and human-computer interaction. I want to understand how social technologies can be designed better to support human learning. In particular, I'm interested in how emergent uses of technology create opportunities for people to construct new knowledge together.
My thesis work with Amy Bruckman in the Electronic Learning Communities Lab examines online communities and the computational tools that support productive interaction for learning and identity transformation among community members. I am developing new wiki tools for classrooms and exploring notions of audience and identity as I investigate how learners' writing practices are transformed through interactions in online spaces.
In my dissertation work I address the question, how do people reason about and experience credibility and knowledge production in an information landscape filled with social and participatory forms of media?
aforte(at)cc(dot)gatech(dot)edu