Mark Guzdial Director of

New or Darn Useful!

Semester (daily) Schedule See also Travel Schedule NOTE!: I am now in Technology Square Research Building (TSRB) Room 341. I'm above Moe's (lucky me!).
• Learning CS through a Media Computation Context. CS1315 Course website, CS1316 Course website (the course that "The Lion King" Chronicle reference is referring to), and planning and development website (where more papers can be found). It's on my to-do list to merge all of these. Real soon now. There is now also a Media Computation teachers website.
• My Personal CoWeb where I put all kinds of stuff. (My blog for our summer in Oxford.) My AniAniWeb is where I'm moving more of my personal stuff.
• NSF-Sponsored Workshop on Multimedia in CS Education
• Collaborative Software Lab Website!
• CS4660 Undergraduate Educational Technology
• CS4670 and CS7567 Computer Supported Collaborative Learning
• CS4803 Computer Music Implementation
• Python book out December 2004 (Java book expected December 2005): .
• Description of the Squeak books:
• Project Ideas list for students looking for something to do: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~mark.guzdial/projects.html
• The Squeakers WebSite: The more informal and more out-of-date version of Collaborative Software Lab Website. Internal Squeakers site
• New Computer Science Education Research Group
• A "Swiki" or CoWeb on Swikis at http://pbl.cc.gatech.edu/myswiki (old PWS style) and http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/swiki (new Comanche style).
• Papers Available on-line (See also http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/Papers)

Older, maybe less useful:

• CS2340 Objects and Design Class Website. Includes a variety of Squeak resources.
• Slides from CSEET'98 Keynote: Powerpoint and HTML
• Tour of Learning Sciences and Technologies Websites: http://pbl.cc.gatech.edu/lst.12
• Drafts of papers submitted to CSCL'99 at http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/guzdial/5
• PowerPoint presentation on Open Source Web Courses (OSWeC): http://guzdial.cc.gatech.edu/oswc-GVURR99.ppt
• AERA paper on motivation issues on the CoWeb: http://guzdial.cc.gatech.edu/papers/aera99/

OLDER INFORMATION: Mark is a member of the GVU Center, the Cognitive Science program, and the EduTech Institute. He received his Ph.D. in education and computer science (a joint degree) at the University of Michigan in 1993, where he developed Emile, an environment for high school science learners programming multimedia demonstrations and physics simulations. He is also the designer of MediaText, a multimedia composition environment used in elementary and high school classrooms.

Areas of Interest

Mark Guzdial's current research centers on facilitating student learning through student design, construction, and analysis of artifacts. Philosophically, he is a constructivist, even a constructionist, but he sees a need for support to enable and facilitate a student's construction of artifacts and knowledge.

His goal is to provide to students similar kinds of opportunities that professional scientists and engineers have for learning and exploring through computation. He has developed simulation environments for learning science through construction, and is now exploring simulation, reflection, and collaboration environments to facilitate science and engineering learning. To evaluate the usability and learnability of the environments he creates, Mark is developing techniques for analysis of user event traces (log files).

One way of looking at what Mark is working on is collaborative Dynabooks. He wants to achieve the Dynabook vision (of Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, Dan Ingalls, of the Xerox PARC Learning Research Group in the 70's, and now the Disney Imagineering Media Research Group) of a learning machine for developing computational media. He adds to that vision a desire for a collaborative environment where media can be easily created, shared, and distributed by groups.

Mark co-organized a workshop with Rick Weingarten of Computing Research Association for the National Science Foundation. The charge of the workshop was to set a research agenda for Computer Science in Educational Technology. The final report of that workshop is available in PDF format. The draft report from that workshop is available on-line (with separate chapters as separate HTML files -- mostly the same content, easier to read with a slow net connection).

Papers and Talks

• Papers List and Group papers list
• Slides from CSEET'98 Keynote: Powerpoint and HTML
• Opinionated essays and editorials

Recent Classes with Interesting Home Pages

• CS 2390 Modeling and Design, Winter '96 which is where, WebCaMILE was first used in CS 2390.
• CS 2390 Modeling and Design, Spring '96 where STABLE was first used.
• CS 6398, Design and Evaluation of Educational Software
• CS 2390 Modeling and Design, Fall '96
• CS 6397, Educational Technology in Winter '97.
• CS 2390 for Spring '97. This offering of the class is interesting from the teacher's perspective. I'm using a website management tool which integrates grading, update and connection to CaMILE, and web page creation.
• CS8011g GVU-EdTech Seminar for Spring '97
• CS 2390, Modeling and Design in Summer '97 -- offered in the nifty-cool Classroom 2000, so has interesting features like connections to audio and whiteboard recordings of lectures.
• CS8011f GVU-EdTech Seminar in Fall'97.
• CS2390, Modeling and Design in Winter '98. First use of BOOST and Swiki.
• CS2390, Modeling and Design W98. New approach to UI in this class.
• CS2390, Modeling and Design Fall98. First using my new textbook!
• CS2390, Modeling and Design Spring99. Last offering of the class, first using MuSwiki.
• CS2340 Objects and Design, semester-based successor to CS2390, still based on Squeak.
• Computer Supported Collaborative Learning
• Computer Music Implementation

Current Research Projects

If you're a student and interested on working on a project with me, please check out my mini-projects list. (Updated Frequently!)

• Overview of the Collaborative Software Lab.

• Studying the Cost Effectiveness and Educational Benefits of the CoWeb

• Collaborative Modeling for Curriculum Integration (CMCI): Matthew Realff, Pete Ludovice, Tom Morley, and I are developing a collaborative website to be used by students to generate cross-curricular links. Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

• Collaborative Multimedia - The Squeakers: The Georgia Tech Squeakers are inspired by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg's vision of Personal Dynamic Media -- the computer as a meta-medium that supports composition of all other media from text and graphics, to audio and animation, and beyond to computational media. Our particular focus is on collaboration: Simplify the sharing, composition, and distribution of metamedia across networks. We use the programming language Squeak, hence, the group name.

• Software-Realized Scaffolding and Learner-Centered Design: The design of Emile revolved around providing software-realization of what educators called scaffolding, support which enables students to perform activities and to learn through those activities. In collaboration with Elliot Soloway, Kenneth E. Hay, and Yasmin Kafai, an interface design emphasis on learner-centered design is evolving, part of which is software-realized scaffolding.

• Anchored Collaborative Learning Environments For a collaborative learning environment to be most effective, collaboration must be embedded within and integrated with learning activities -- that is, the collaboration must be "anchored". We have done several anchored collaborative learning environments over the last five years: CaMILE, Web-SMILE, and others. (CaMILE is available for download off the Anchored Collaborative Learning Environments page.) The most recent is "Swiki." A Swiki is a new kind of collaboration tool which is essentially a website authored by both students and teachers. The main advantage of it over CaMILE and similar CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) environments is flexibility -- and the users of Swiki this quarter are definitely making the most of it. Classes in Architecture, HPS, Chemical Engineering, and Computer Science are using Swikis in a wonderful diversity of styles and purposes. CaMILE can be seen as MediaText on a network. The successor to CaMILE is SMILE. A Web version of SMILE has been created and is in use in middle schools. A tour of Web-SMILE is available. You can try out a Swiki at http://pbl.cc.gatech.edu/myswiki. Or download a Swiki server for your platform at http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/swiki

Older Projects

• Supporting Student Modeling: DEVICE (Dynamic Environment for Visualization in Chemical Engineering is an environment in which Chemical Engineering students learn through a process of design in a simulated world. DEVICE was developed by Noel Rappin. The eventual goal is to merge DEVICE-like simulation support with CaMILE-like collaboration tools to create broad-based support for learning in Chemical Engineering -- SCOPE, Scaffolded and COntextualized Programming Environments for Engineering Education. This project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The follow-on to this work is BOOST for CS students learning object-oriented modeling.

• Log file analyses and visualizations are used to understand the effectiveness of the supports provided in these environments.

• NSF Multimedia Courseware Project: With John Stasko and Jim Foley, I am working on creating effective multimedia courseware for Computer Science courses using WWW.

• Cognitive Multimedia: A project with John Stasko, Richard Catrambone, Ashwin Ram, and Mike Byrne, sponsored by ONR, focuses on trying to understand the most effective ways to construct interactive multimedia.

• Generalized Scaffolding: STABLE is a first attempt at creating generalized scaffolding -- not modifying the environment, but providing scaffolding, multiple representations, generic "plan" libraries (a la GPCeditor or Emile), and collaborative environments in support of an existing work environment (VisualWorks Smalltalk). STABLE has been used several times in CS 2390 Modeling and Design. We are also developing ABLEs for Chemical Engineering and Java programming.

• WorkingMan's MOO: I've just started working with MOOs (inspired by the work of Amy Bruckman). In my work, I was using MOOs as an infrastructure to connect a variety of learning tools. Visit the WorkingMan's MOO home page for more information on my approach.

• Cross-platform Squeak-based Pluggable WebServer: A toolkit for anchored collaborative learning environments.
• Starting a Website describing Squeak and our work with it
• NSF Sponsored Design Education Workshop Website, held Sept. 8 and 9 at Georgia Tech's College of Computing
• GPCeditor (Goal Plan Code Editor) is a Pascal programming environment that provides explicit supports for student design.

• MediaText is a multimedia composition environment for grades 6-12 students. Mark designed MediaText with Elliot, and MediaText is now a commercial product developed by Constructive Instruments and distributed by Apple Computer and Wings for Learning.

• Emile is a programming environment for science students exploring physics by creating simulations. Emile was Mark's dissertation work. Emile implements software-realized scaffolding which provides adaptable levels of support.

Contact information:

Link to my wife's home page.