Christopher Hoadley

Basics

Dr. Christopher Hoadley
Associate Professor

Penn State University

College of Education and College of Information Sciences and Technology

314D Keller Bldg.
University Park , PA , 16802 USA

+1 (814) 863 0415

http://www.tophe.net/

Download vcard (from hcard above)
Curriculum Vitae [pdf format, updated 7 July 2007]

I am on the faculty at Penn State University and work in a field called the learning sciences (I previously served as president of the International Society for the Learning Sciences). I am in a joint appointment between two programs:

the Instructional Systems Program of the Learning and Performance Systems Department of the College of Education, and
The College of Information Sciences and Technology.

You can view my old homepage, or the "official" university homepages for me in Education and IST. Note that the Curriculum Vitae and the Publications Page in my old site are slightly more up to date than the rest. My up-to-date CV and pubs are available above in PDF form only.

For my email address, click my PSU Directory Search and enter my name. You can also drag the link to your toolbar to have ready access to the Penn State directory. (Should work on IE and Safari, not sure about Netscape/Mozilla. With thanks to google for the button on which it's based.) IMPORTANT: To request an appointment, contact the dolcelab assistant at helpme @ dolcelab.org. You can check my availability by looking at Work and Home appointments. My travel is available on Tripit.com and does not show up in these calendars.

My Research

I direct the dolcelab (Design of Learning, Collaboration, & Experience). The dolcelab studies the interconnections between design, learning, technology, and collaboration. Foci include empirical studies of design, design as a research method (design-based research, a term I coined in the mid 1990s), designing with and for collaboration, and technology-mediated learning in socio-technical systems (CSCL).

Active projects

The mountain project: Connecting kids and adults in rural Himalayan villages for environmental education and sustainable living

Technology for identity and learning: studies of identity online in social networking tools such as Facebook, online multiplayer environments such as Second Life and There

The educational accelerator component of the Technology Enhanced Learning in Science (TELS)

Socially relevant representations (SRRs) in support of social capital for school reform

Designers doing and learning: A comparative study of design and design pedagogy across domains such as engineering, architecture, instructional design, and interface design.

Prior projects

On Design-Based Research Methods (DBRM)

The contingency of artificial phenomena has always created doubts as to whether they fall properly within the compass of science. Sometimes these doubts are directed at the... difficulty of disentangling prescription from description. This seems to me not to be the real difficulty. The genuine problem is to show how empirical propositions can be made at all about systems that, given different circumstances, might be quite other than they are.

— Herb Simon

The conjunction of problematic and determinate characters in nature renders every existence, as well as every idea and human act, an experiment in fact, even though not in design. To be intelligently experimental is but to be conscious of this intersection of natural conditions so as to profit by it instead of being at its mercy.

— John Dewey

...the intervention is the outcome (or at least an outcome) in an important sense.

— Design-Based Research Collective (DBRC)