Learning and Collaboration across Generations in a Community

Speaker
Mary Beth Rosson
Professor, Information Sciences & Technology, Pennsylvania State University

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Community networks and information technology bring many new opportunities for learning, interaction, and collaboration into a community. In this talk I will discuss our ongoing research into the effects of collaborative programming projects on residents’ computer literacy and community involvement. We are focusing in particular on the complementary skills and motivations that elderly residents and middle school students bring to such activities. We have organized several workshops in which these two generations work together to explore, design, and construct visual simulations related to community issues. I will describe participants’ problems and successes in using the programming tools, their collaborative interactions, and the simulations that they designed and built. I will conclude by discussing the implications these findings have for our goal of building and maintaining a cross-generation learning community.

Speaker's Bio

Mary Beth Rosson is Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include scenario-based methods for the design and evaluation of interactive systems, the use of network technology to support collaboration, especially in learning contexts, and high-level programming languages and tools. She is co-author of Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction (Morgan Kaufmann, 2002), along with numerous articles, book chapters and tutorials. Dr. Rosson is active in both ACM SIGCHI and ACM SIGPLAN, serving in numerous technical program as well as conference organization roles for the CHI and OOPSLA annual conferences.

Speaker's Website
http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/m/u/mur13/