KMDI Speaker Series: Ben Shapiro on Ethical Design of Online Learning Environments

Abstract

Professor Shapiro will discuss the value-laden choices that researchers must confront in order to construct and study online environments for learning. These choices are both pedagogical (concerning the design of how people interact in order to teach and learn) and ethical (concerning both who benefits and who loses by different system designs, as well as how researchers should study online learning while respecting participants’ to informed consent and privacy). Using examples of current environments (including online games, crowd-sourcing systems, and MOOCs) as well as hypothetical future environments to show how these value-laden choices arise, can be made poorly or well, as well as could be resolved in design and research practices that value privacy, autonomy, and education as a mechanism to achieve social equality.

Bio
Ben Shapiro is the McDonnell Family Professor of Engineering Education at Tufts University, where he is an assistant professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Education, and faculty at the Center for Engineering Education & Outreach. His research group, the Laboratory for Playful Computation, investigates how to create learning environments that empower all youth to learn, express themselves, and improve their communities through playful, collaborative use of programmable technologies. New to the professoriate, Ben recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, where he was a member of the Games+Learning+Society and Computational Optimization research groups. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation, LEGO, and a gift from the McDonnell Family Foundation.

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