I am a Professor of Learning Sciences and Research-Practice Partnerships at the UC Irvine (UCI) School of Education. I am also a Senior Associate Dean at the UCI School of Education (my term: 2024-2027). I conduct research at the intersection of participatory design, technology, education, and community partnerships.
Affiliations
My research lab is the Design & Partnership Lab.
(affectionately daplab for short)
If you’re interested in partnering with us, we focus on using participatory design methods to create community technologies or social systems.
I am the founding director of OCEAN (Orange County Educational Advancement Network), which supports Research-Practice Partnerships at the UCI School of Education.
I am a faculty member of the Connected Learning Lab at UCI.
Prior to UCI, I was an Associate Professor at New York University (NYU) in the Digital Media Design for Learning and Games for Learning programs. I was an Assistant/Associate Professor at the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park, in the College of Information Studies with a joint appointment in the College of Education. During my time at UMD, I was a faculty member at and directed the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL, one of the oldest HCI labs in the country).
Research Interests
My core research interest is understanding how technology and information can enhance the way we learn and deliver education. I do this work in a few ways:
(1) I partner with local organizations, after-school programs, and schools to design new learning environments. The goal of this design-based research is to explore how we might broaden participation and create more equitable learning pathways for learners. I often focus on broadening learning experiences in STEM fields. My collaborators and I have designed everything from alternate reality games and science fiction afterschool clubs to neighborhood STEM ecosystems and learning installations in everyday urban cityscapes.
(2) I develop research-practice partnerships (RPPs) with schools, teachers, and community-based organizations to ground the above design & research projects in the issues and needs of community partners.
(3) I have expertise in designing and studying the impact of new technologies. My projects are varied ranging from creating social media tools for young learners to share science and alternate reality games for scientific inquiry, to creating AI chatbots for college mentoring and data visualization systems for K-12 teachers to improve their instruction.
I utilize my expertise in design methodologies to co-develop new learning technologies, environments, and socio-technical systems to promote equitable opportunities for learners. My collaborators and I then utilize a variety of methodologies, ranging from qualitative case studies to quantitative modeling of data, to understand the efficacy and impact of our designs.
My work sometimes touches on design (creating the technology and learning environments), understanding learners, and the broader societal contexts (e.g. social inequalities, education institutions) within which learning happens with technology.