Scholarship and Biography
A professor of Computer Science at Brandeis University with affiliations in Psychology and the Volen National Center for Complex Systems. His research is interdisciplinary with a strong computational basis. A typical project develops software that supports online collaboration, combining software and cognitive engineering with quantitative and qualitative methods of evaluation. A sample of topics includes small group cohesion, reflective modes of joint problem solving, inline training for application skill building, and apprenticeship as an approach to learning to program. Earlier in his career his primary focus was artificial intelligence and cognitive modeling; topics included planning and activity, convention in joint activity, and reading, text inferencing, and dictionaries. He is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. He was a founding board member of the Society of Text and Discourse. He is a long time member of the Cognitive Science community.