Todd Fennimore
Hi, everyone! Congratulations on being admitted! I look forward to visiting the campus; meeting prospective students, faculty, and current graduate students; and joining the Ph.D. program in Human-centered Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Currently, I am Director of Instructional Design at eSchool Online, Inc., division of Classroom Connect, a Harcourt Education Company. I came to eSchool Online from the Ohio State University Research Foundation, where I was a Senior Research Associate at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) and the Eisenhower Clearinghouse on Mathematics and Science Education (ENC). At OSC, I worked on a number of projects developing educational applications and tools using visualization, hypermedia authoring, and on-line collaboration. I participated in a joint effort with NCSA to create web-based "collaboratories" engaging secondary students in authentic inquiry around open-ended research questions as they worked with scientists in such areas as environmental hydrology, genetics, and embryology (e.g., the Chickscope project). At ENC, I assisted teachers in developing and using protocols for evaluating educational software in terms of its ability to foster conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills in math and science, and supported these teachers in training other teachers throughout Ohio in this software evaluation process. Previous to this, I was Associate Director of the Midwest Consortium for Mathematics and Science Education, operated under the auspices of North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL). In this position, I coordinated the development of Web-based resources for mathematics and science educators. I also helped state departments of education, school districts, and schools throughout the Midwest integrate their movement toward constructivist approaches in mathematics and science learning with broader efforts aimed at systemic change. I have a B.S. in Psychology (with a minor in Sociology) from The Ohio State University and received a Master’s degree in Public Administration (with a concentration in Public Policy Analysis) from the Illinois Institute of Technology.
I am interested in conceptualizing, implementing, and evaluating ubiquitous computing environments that help users understand and shape change in complex systems as a seamless aspect of their everyday activity and professional practice, especially in scientific and technical domains. I have as a working hypothesis that the generative metaphor of 'flow' structures one's thinking about change across diverse domains of human activity and experience. I want to explore how this metaphor can be writ large – or embodied – in the design and use of ubiquitous computing environments. My exploration, then, would be focused around this research question: In what ways can ubiquitous computing environments, constituted by networks of embedded sensors, processors, and actuators, embody the generative metaphor of 'flow' and thereby enable users to understand and shape change, especially in complex systems?
Georgia Tech provides a vigorous intellectual community to pursue this overarching research question – a community that brings together researchers from diverse disciplines for building a rich understanding of ubiquitous computing environments, the evolving cognitive-cultural systems that emerge from them, and the character of actors’ cognition and interactions as they carry out knowledge-producing activities in these environments. Georgia Tech is the ideal academic environment to conduct this research for a number of reasons: the leading researchers in this field (e.g., Nersessian, Mynatt, Abowd) are all from Georgia Tech; academic programs at Georgia Tech draw upon all of the major disciplines of cognitive science (psychology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology); Georgia Tech has a tradition of promoting cross-disciplinary collaboration; and Georgia Tech is at the forefront of designing, implementing, and evaluating emerging technologies. And the program in Human-centered Computing seems to me a natural home within Georgia Tech for pursuing this interest.
I'm excited about discovering the connections between my research interests and yours in my visit!