Attendees
From SocialSoftwareSymposium
Attendee Biographies
Biographies are included here if they have been received.
Feel free to edit/update your own entry.
Janna Anderson, Elon University and Pew Internet and American Life Project
Janna Quitney Anderson is an assistant professor and director of internet projects at Elon University's School of Communications. Her expertise is concentrated in the fields of internet history; the future of the internet; and print/online journalism. She has directed several major studies for the Pew Internet & American Life Project, building the “Imagining the Internet: A History and Forecast” site (www.elon.edu/predictions) and its various research components and completing an ethnographic study of the use of the internet by small-town families (www.elon.edu/pew/oneweek ). She is the author of the book "Imagining the Internet: Personalities, Predictions, Perspectives," (2005, Rowman & Littlefield). She joined the faculty at Elon in 1999, following a 20-year career as an editor and reporter for daily newspapers in Minnesota and North Dakota. She has written articles for the New York Times News Service, USA Today, Newspaper Research Journal, Operant Subjectivity and Advertising Age. She is a co-author of the 2005 Pew Internet report "The Future of the Internet" (http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/expertsurveys/2004survey.xhtml ), and is completing a follow-up survey to that report.
Deborah Barreau, UNC-Chapel Hill
I have been an assistant professor at UNC/SILS for the last five years, but I have been an educator and a researcher much longer. My research focuses on organizational behavior, including the information needs and uses of individuals in work environments. I am interested in how people communicate in work environments, and I have worked in a variety of environments myself – public schools, libraries, and corporations as well as universities. In each case, I find that social dynamics and personal networks play an important role in how people define, identify, and use information. The Internet has enabled the integration of the worlds in which we live and work, and I am interested in the impact of the overlap of these worlds on organizations. My goals for the symposium are to engage in discussion about the potential effects of computer-based social networking on our institutions and to explore potential research questions, methods, and collaborations.
Songphan Choemprayong, UNC-Chapel Hill
Songphan is a Ph.D. student at School of Information and Library Science at UNC-CH. He is interested in interaction and communication of virtual community in critical incidents including the roles of social networking software creating and maintaining community. He is also interested in roles of policy in governing online community from international perspectives.
Website: http://sils.unc.edu/~songphan
Weblog: http://iteau.wordpress.com
Jade Coutts, University of Florida
I'm a 23 year old first year PhD student at UF. I am currently teaching an undergraduate course EME 2040, Introduction to Educational Technology. I was born in Columbus, Ohio and moved shortly thereafter to Florida. I grew up in a small beach town on the west coast near Sarasota called Englewood. I moved to Gainesville just after graduating from high school and have received both my B.A. and my M.Ed. from the University of Florida.
When I am not consumed by my school responsibilities, I enjoy snowboarding, watching movies, playing soccer, music, watching Seinfeld, spending time with family and friends, and reading. Whenever possible I spend time in Colorado and go mountain biking in the summers and snowboarding in the winters. I hope to one day move out west and explore the mountains. I've travel to Austria, Italy, and Germany and would like to one day go back to Europe.
I started my college career in the summer of 2001 just after I graduated high school. I moved to Gainesville and began my undergraduate degree in Architecture. After a semester of gluing my fingers together, I decided I needed to follow my heart and become involved in what I've always loved- working with young children. I received my B.A. from the University of Florida in Special Education in 2005. The next year in May I received my M. E.d for UF in Early Childhood Education with a specialization in Educational Technology.
During the ProTEACH program I began to wonder if I was ready to have my own classroom or if I wanted to jump into teaching just after graduating. As a result of my recent specialization and conversations with Dr. Ferdig and Dr. Dawson, I became more interested in the idea of incorporating technology into the classroom and over the summer of 2005 I made the decision to apply to the doctorate program in Curriculum and Instruction.
After my acceptance, I was notified that I would be teaching EME 2040: Introduction to Technology starting in the Fall 2006. So far this teaching opportunity has been wonderful. I am able to integrate technology into my teaching, collaborate with two other experienced instructors, work with college undergraduates who are from a variety of departments across campus, and I am gaining valuable teaching experience.
Kara Dawson, University of Florida
I am an Associate Professor in the School of Teaching and Learning at the University of Florida. I currently serve as the Program Coordinator for our face-to-face graduate programs in Educational Technology and as Co-coordinator of our online M.Ed. and Ed.S. programs. Broadly, my research interests are at the intersection of educational theory, technology use and learning. A significant portion of my research has been devoted to teacher inquiry, K-12/university partnerships and what we can learn about technology integration and student learning from such efforts. Within this vein, I am currently collaborating on the evaluation of the 1:1 computing efforts of over 400 teachers in 11 Florida districts.
For the purposes of the upcoming symposium, I am particularly interested in expanding my knowledge of social networking and social tagging, in developing collaborative research studies and determining the implications for education.
Website: http://www.coe.ufl.edu/faculty/dawson/index.html
Nicole Ellison, Michigan State University
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at MSU. Broadly speaking, I study the social implications of new information and communication technologies. Most recently I have examined the ways in which online, written self-expression enables individuals to connect with others, increase self-knowledge, and potentially engage in positive self change. Currently, I am involved in several projects: relationship formation, self-presentation strategies, and privacy/security concerns among online dating participants; the effects of blogging in the classroom; writing about the 'Ideal Self" online; and the use of social networking services, specifically Facebook. My previous research has explored the formation of virtual communities and the ways in which teleworkers and their families use ICTs to calibrate the permeability of their home/work boundaries.
Andrea Forte, Georgia Tech
Andrea is a PhD candidate in Human-Centered Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. In her work with Amy Bruckman in the Electronic Learning Communities lab, she examines online communities and the computational tools that support learning and identity transformation among community members. Some of her research interests and projects include power relationships in social networking sites, community building on wikis, and understanding the relationship between research and design.
Website: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~aforte
Jackson Fox, UNC-Chapel Hill
I am a first-year PhD student in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I am also a user experience designer at Lulu.com.
My research interests include human-computer interaction, collaboration, social software, and personal information management. I use del.icio.us religiously, and I am currently attempting to re-factor my tag cloud into a set of facets. I think that social networking is largely a feature, rather than a business model. I am interested in the the tools that social networking sites make available to users for managing their identity, and I am concerned that there is an inherent conflict between privacy/identity management and commercial interests.
Susan Gov, Georgia Tech
Susan Gov is a second-year Computer Science Masters student specializing in Human-Computer Interaction at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is currently studying how people create and manage their identities across multiple online communities and specifically within the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook. Her goal is to understand how the context of an online community affects the way its members create and manage their identities within that community. How these identities are managed within different contexts should offer insight into how aggregators such as Netvibes, Trillian, and Meebo affect the management of a person's identities across the various applications being aggregated. Susan received her BS in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Website: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~sgov
Jose-Marie Griffiths, UNC-Chapel Hill
José-Marie Griffiths is Dean and a Professor of the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Griffiths has a research and administrative career that spans 30 years. She recently served as a member of the U.S. President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), and also served as a member of the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS). She is the recipient of numerous awards for her contributions to information science, information technology for higher education, the development of IT industry in Michigan, and community networking in Tennessee. She holds a B.Sc. in Physics and Ph.D. in Information Science from University College London.
Harry Halpin, University of Edinburgh
I'm a Ph.D. student of the philosopher Andy Clark and the computer scientist Henry Thompson in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and am currently visiting Duke University as a fellow of the Interface Seminar, a seminar devoted to exploring the "interface" between human and machines through the lens of work in the digital humanities. In this capacity, I am co-organizing the "HASTAC" InFormation Conference at Duke in April. I am active in trying to bridge the gap between the Semantic Web and the "Web 2.0" within the World Wide Web Consortium. In that role, I'm the chair of the GRDDL Working Group and member of the Semantic Web Co-ordination Group, which is working on producing a standard to convert microformats to RDF data capable of being used with Semantic Web technologies as well as considering the transition between Web 2.0 technologies and the Semantic Web.
Homepage: http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin
Carolyn Hank, UNC-Chapel Hill
Carolyn Hank is a TRLN Doctoral Fellow at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Currently, she is working on a committee charged with developing and deploying an institutional repository at UNC-CH. Her current interests are in engagement and adoption of new technologies, in light of the IR movement, and open access and intellectualy property rights issues.
Weblog: http://sadpony.wordpress.com/
Paul Jones, UNC-Chapel Hill
Paul Jones holds faculty appointments in the School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina -- Chapel Hill where he is also director of ibiblio.org A contributor-run digital library and archive now in its 14th year.
Jones has been active in the Free Software and Open Source movement since the 1980s. He has been one of the principal organizers (actually just helping the real organizers) of the Triangle Bloggers Conference, the PodcasterCon 2006 and 2007, BarCampRDU and the upcoming North Carolina Science Bloggers Conference -- amongst other things.
Sri Kalyanaraman, UNC-Chapel Hill
Assistant Professor Sri Kalyanaraman joined the School's faculty in fall 2002. He received his doctorate from Penn State's College of Communications, where he was coordinator of the Media Effects Research Laboratory. He teaches courses in communication technology and media effects. His research primarily focuses on new media, media effects and research methodology.
Kalyanaraman is setting up a Media Effects Lab in the School. His research has been published in such journals as Communication Research, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media and Journal of Advertising. Kalyanaraman has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and professional experience in marketing, finance and engineering. He has also been host of quiz shows on network television and has freelanced for several publications.
Jacob Kramer-Duffield, UNC-Chapel Hill
I'm a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I study identity, particularly the effects of increased use of information communications technology on how we relate to each other, the state and society. I'm interested in issues of identity - most specifically, the effects of increased use of information communications technology on how we relate to each other, the state and society. In the longer term, I want to figure out how to design systems of governance and civil society in ways that are relevant to how people live their lives today (and tomorrow!); in the shorter term, figuring out what all these words that I use, mean, is a good first step. Current blog is here; more biographical information is here
Cliff Lampe, Michigan State University
Cliff Lampe is Assistant Professor at Michigan State University. In research, Cliff works with online communites, including Facebook, Slashdot, SourceForge and Newstrust. A subset of that interest is the use of recommender and reputation systems to guide massively scaled online interactions.
Addy Lee, Georgia Tech
Addy Lee (http://www.addylee.com) is a second-year Human-Computer Interaction Masters student at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is currently studying dating behavior on social networking sites, MySpace and Friendster. Her goal is to understand how public display of social connections and the ability to comment on profiles influence how users search, contact, and communicate with potential dates. Addy received a BA in Psychology from Vanderbilt University.
Cal Lee, UNC-Chapel Hill
I'm on the faculty of the School of Information and Library Science at UNC.
My main research interests relate to long-term digital preservation and electronic records management. "Digital Curation" is a phrase that has been gaining in popularity recently and pretty well characterizes the scope of my research. I'm particularly interested in exploring the most appropriate socio-technical arrangements for digital curation in particular institutional and organizational contexts (e.g. formal arrangements, standardization, business models, professional development).
I recently completed a study entitled, "Defining Digital Preservation Work: A Case Study of the Development of the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System" (OAIS). Social networks played an important part in that study. Among other things, I investigated the participation patterns of both individuals and organizations who contributed to the OAIS development effort.
I'm interested in further exploring several phenomena that can be informed by social network data: participation patterns in other standardization efforts, social structures related to the diffusion of innovations in digital curation, and the evolution of boundaries between related professions.
As for "social software," I have at least two major interests:
(1) How techniques such as collaborative filtering, recommender systems and social tagging can contribute to the descriptive practices of archivists and other curators of digital collections.
(2) How and whether to preserve the most significant properties of digital objects that depend on social software (e.g. preserving wikis, databases of tags, user profiles and other traces of links between individuals or organizations).
To find out more about me than you'd probably ever care to know: http://www.ils.unc.edu/callee/
Amanda Lenhart, Pew Internet and American Life Project
Amanda Lenhart is a Senior Research Specialist with the Pew Internet & American Life Project and has been with the Project since its inception in 1999. Amanda is the lead author of several Pew Internet Project reports, including The Ever-Shifting Internet Population: A New Look at Internet Access and the Digital Divide, Protecting Teens Online, Teens and Technology: Youth are Leading the Transition to a Fully Wired and Mobile Nation, Teen Content Creators and Consumers, and most recently, Bloggers. All Pew Internet Project reports are available for free online at http://www.pewinternet.org.
Amanda has also taught as an Adjunct Instructor at American University in Washington, DC.
She graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College with a double major in English and Anthropology, and she earned a Masters with distinction from Georgetown University in Communications, Culture and Technology. Amanda's Masters thesis at CCT addressed the topic of blogging, specifically examining how bloggers recognize and interact with their audience, and how norms of behavior are established around those interactions. Her thesis can be found online at http://lenhart.flashesofpanic.com/Lenhart_thesis.pdf
Gary Marchionini, UNC-Chapel Hill
I am the Cary C. Boshamer Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at UNC-CH. My research sits at the intersection of information retrieval (IR) and human-computer interaction (HCI). See my webpage [1]. My specific interests related to this workshop follows.
Social Software Symposium Statement of Interest
I am interested in people and information and the impacts that social networking software and services (SNSS) have on individuals, information, and their interactions. From the human side, I am especially interested in the ways that personal identity is influenced by conscious and emergent actions in cyberspace. The totality of these influences at any instant in time is what I term a proflection and the persistent sum of these proflections over time defines one’s personal identity in cyberspace. A proflection is composed of the projections we consciously or unconsciously emanate into cyberspace (our exoinformation) and the reflections that echo through the techno-socio fabric of cyberspace. Reflections are often emergent rather than predictable and are the result of both social actions taken by other human beings (e.g., tagging our projections, communicating directly with us) as well as the computational actions taken by machines that monitor, mimic, and mine actions in cyberspace.
From the information side, I am especially interested in surrogation and how SNSS affect how information is found and understood. Surrogates are metadata designed to help people understand the gist of information before they accept (consume) the full information experience an information object offers. Snippets in search results and social tagging are common examples of surrogates. Most surrogates today are expressed in textual formats and I am interested in other media and multimedia surrogates. For example what does it mean to tag with images, sounds, motions, video, and behavior instantiated in digital code or wetware (DNA)? More practically, how we can create and use such surrogates and what will their impact be on information retrieval and use? We have done extensive work with visual surrogates for video, are engaged in studies of audio surrogates for video and plan to investigate the issues of multi-channel synchronization on multimedia surrogates.
Both of these interests pose difficult evaluation challenges and my main interest in this symposium is to explore how we might evaluate SNSS impact on people and information. In the past, I have used transaction log analysis focused on state transitions to study individual search behavior, however, the interactions among even small groups of people require different graph-analytic techniques and I hope to hear some ideas related to these techniques. The approach I most often take to understand people and information is to conduct laboratory-based user studies, however, these may not be appropriate except for highly specified research questions and I am curious to learn whether there are any such specific questions that might be studied this way.
Cathy Marshall, Microsoft Research
Cathy Marshall is a senior researcher at Microsoft and an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University. She’s been around the block a few a times with social software, starting with the development of several collaborative hypertext systems (including the euphonious Aquanet) in the 1980s and 1990s. Metadata has also been on her mind frequently over the past few decades; her metadata work includes a study of how library staff at a university’s educational technology center assigned metadata to a digitized art and architecture photo collectionand how annotations can be aggregated as a social means of identifying what’s important in a long document.
This checkered history has given rise to a certain healthy skepticism about the limits of social software. When her fellow computer science researchers told her, for example, that the ESP Game would result in the painless assignment of high-quality tags to Web-based images, she compulsively played the game for three straight days, then expressed serious doubts. Each time she has received yet another invitation to join LinkedIn or a solicitation from Classmates.com to take a peek at how the years have treated her junior high school pals, she claims to be nonplussed. She has been known to call these social networking services Amway for the digital age.
Yet she understands that social software has an undeniable allure. Some of the most effective uses of networked computers stem from the ease with which digital stuff can be shared and the added ways they give us to communicate with each other. Thus therein lies the heart of social software research: what are the limits of what we can reasonably expect it to achieve? When are the folksonomies useful, and when do they fail miserably? Why is FaceBook compelling and LinkedIn not? Will FaceBook be ruined as it expands out of the campuses and into broader territory? Are the answers to all these questions and more buried in Wikipedia?
Cathy Marshall’s website is http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall
Her blog nomiddleinitial is http://ccmarshall.blogspot.com/
Alice Marwick, New York University
Alice is a PhD student in the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University (advisor: Siva Vaidhyanathan), where she works on the political economy of new media, online identity, and feminist media theory. She is currently working on several projects around the interplay of user practice and commercial internet spaces, including MySpace, YouTube, and LiveJournal. Alice has worked in the technology industry since 1995 as a project planner and strategist and currently consults for social software companies. She holds a MA in Communication from the University of Washington (thesis chair David Silver)and a double BA in Women's Studies and Political Science from Wellesley College.
Blog: http://www.tiara.org/blog/
Erik Mitchell, UNC-Chapel Hill
Erik is a PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill and IT Development Librarian at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, NC. His research interests include metadata, personal information management, and systems interoperability. He is currently investigating how social software applications could be used to replace/enhance traditional library discovery/collaboration services. More information on this project can be found at http://wiki.zsr.wfu.edu/mitcheet
Lilly Nguyen, UCLA
Lilly Nguyen is a PhD student at the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. Her research interests focus on network culture, exchange systems, information adaptation, and multimedia content. She is interested in exploring social software in contexts of sharing and emergent systems. She is also interested in exploring the socio-theoretical implications of these systems. Previously, she worked as a research associate at the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) where her work focused on information use behaviors in relation to the prevailing organizational cultures, structures, and processes within educational institutions. She previously received her MSc in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She also received her Bachelor’s in Political Economy from UC Berkeley.
Jung Sun Oh, UNC-Chapel Hill
I'm a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My current research interest center around social networks and social tagging. I am working on my dissertation project, which will include analyses of social networks induced from people's bookmarking/tagging activities on del.icio.us.
Terrell Russell, UNC-Chapel Hill
Terrell is a PhD Student at SILS and is interested in online identity, folksonomy , and expertise.
He is a co-founder of claimID.com and the creator of Cloudalicious, where you can visualize how tagclouds change over time.
His current work involves combining these two areas of interest into Contextual Authority Tagging, where he hopes to help organizations and individuals visualize what others think they know (cognitive authority).
Website: http://terrellrussell.com
Weblog: http://weblog.terrellrussell.com
Chirag Shah, UNC-Chapel Hill
Chirag Shah is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He did his MTech in Computer Science from IIT Madras, India and MS in Computer Science from UMass Amherst. His research interests are information retrieval and filtering, interactive systems and user feedback, and social networks. He is working with Prof. Gary Marchionini and Prof. Diane Kelly.
Website: http://www.cs.umass.edu/~chirag
Laura Sheble, UNC-Chapel Hill
Laura Sheble is a Ph.D. Student and TRLN fellow in the Information and Library Science Program and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She is interested in creativity and intellectual property issues in the context of social networks and the reuse or recombination of existing works. She is also interested in identity (or the representation of identities) online and anonymity, including in relation to security and privacy technologies and policies.
Kristina Spurgin, UNC-Chapel Hill
I'm a PHD student at the School of Information and Library Science. I received a Masters of Library Science from the School of Information Science and Policy at the State University of New York at Albany in May 2003.
My primary research interests are the organization of information (by individuals, groups, and institutions) and personal information management. I'm interested in social tagging/folksonomies as a point where the interests of the individual and the dynamics of social groups meet in organizing information. I'm also interested in how the resulting descriptions may (or may not be) be useful for complementing more traditional information organization systems. My current study in this area is an exploratory comparison of the tags assigned to works cataloged in personal book libraries using the social tagging/networking site LibraryThing, with traditional subject descriptions as assigned by catalogers.
Website: http://www.infomuse.net
Fred Stutzman, UNC-Chapel Hill
Fred Stutzman is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. His research interests include identity, social software and networks, and the effects of social technologies. His research is operationalized in the claimID.com project, of which he is the co-founder.
Website: http://www.ibiblio.org/fred
Weblog: http://chimprawk.blogspot.com
Zeynep Tufekci, UMBC
Zeynep Tufekci is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. She has been involved in research on digital divide and gender, race and social class at University of Texas at Austin where she completed her Ph.D. on technology policy. Her research interests include social and cultural impacts of technology, inequality, and privacy. Since arriving at UMBC, she has been involved in research on gender, race and class differences in IT impacts and social network site use among college students. She has a degree in computer programming and worked as a programmer before switching to an academic career.
Thomas Vander Wal, Folksonomy Expert
Thomas Vander Wal [2] has a broad background in the web and information technology sector. He regularly speaks on information architecture, interaction design, accessibility, web standards, the future of web development, and user-centered design at IA Summit, STC, SXSW, Design Engaged, WebVisions, Web Directions, many CHI conferences, and various workshops in North America, Europe, and around the Pacific Rim. He has been written about in many publications including, The New York Times, News.com Wired Magazine, Business Week, CIO Magazine, MIT Technology Review, London Guardian, and many others. Thomas helped found Boxes and Arrows and the Information Architecture Institute [3], and is currently on the Steering Committee for the Web Standards Project [4].
In 2004 he coined the term Folksonomy and is researching, advising, and developing tagging systems and social networking services. He consults on social computing and around his Personal InfoCloud [5] and Local InfoCloud frameworks. In 2005 he became founder and principal of InfoCloud Solutions, Inc. [6], a web consulting and product development firm.
David Weinberger, writer and Fellow, Harvard Berkman Center
David Weinberger, Ph.D. (http://www.evident.com) is interested in the effect of the Internet on our most basic ideas, a topic he explored as a co-author of the bestseller, "The Cluetrain Manifesto" and in "Small Pieces Loosely Joined. His new book, "Everything Is Miscellaneous," is about how the new ways of organizing information online are transforming the authority and ownership of knowledge; it will be published by Times Books in May, 2007. David writes the well-known blog "Joho." His work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, USA Today, Wired, Salon, The Guardian, Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 and many others. He is a commentator on National Public Radio and is a columnist for KMWorld and Il Sole 24 ore, the financial daily newspaper in Italy.
As a marketing consultant he worked with companies from startups to Fortune 500s. During the 2004 presidential campaign, he was Senior Internet Advisor to the Howard Dean campaign, consulting on Internet policy. David has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto and taught college philosophy for six years before entering high tech. He is currently a Fellow at the Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He lives in Boston.
Fuller bio.
Barbara Wildemuth, UNC-Chapel Hill
I am a professor in the School of Information and Library Science. My research interests focus on how people seek information (particularly from computer-mediated information systems) and use the information they find. I have studied information behaviors in several domains, with most of my work focusing on the medical domain (medical students, patients, personal health records) and interaction with digital video (as part of the Open Video project, http://www.open-video.org/). I teach courses in systems analysis, user interface design, information ethics, and various aspects of research/evaluation.
While most of my prior studies have focused on individual behaviors, I believe that most information behaviors have a social component. Over the past few semesters, I have advised a number of student research projects related to social aspects of information behaviors, including a current study of social tagging (for which I should be able to summarize the final results by the time we gather).
Website: http://www.ils.unc.edu/~wildem/wildemuth.html
Senom Yalcin, Indiana
Senom Yalcin is a researcher of online social interactions with a focus on thinking and knowledge construction processes, and is also interested in theoretical and practical aspects of the design of instructional environments. She has been teaching and designing online courses for the past 6 years at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she recently received her PhD in Language Education/Instructional Systems Technology.
Sarita Yardi, Georgia Tech
Sarita Yardi is a doctoral student in the Human-Centered Computing program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her current research goals are to design an online social networking community to encourage participation in computing and technical fields. Sarita previously worked with the Digital Youth research group at UC Berkeley where she conducted ethnographic studies of kids' informal learning with digital media. She received her Masters in Information Management & Systems at UC Berkeley's School of Information and her BA in Computer Engineering at Dartmouth College.
Website: http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/~yardi
Alla Zollers, UCLA
Alla Zollers is currently a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles in the department of Information Studies. She also holds a Masters’ in Human-Computer Interaction from the School of Informatics at Indiana University, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Her dissertation will focus on the social construction of knowledge, relevance and community on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. Her broad research interests include: social classification, social networking, sociology of information, alternative and activist media, trust, social informatics, online cultural studies, and digital copyright.
Website: http://www.ayre.org
Blog: http://blog.ayre.org
