Chris Dede

Dr. Chris Dede, http://www.gse.harvard.edu/~dedech/, is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. His funded research includes a grant from the National Science Foundation to aid middle school students learning science via shared virtual environments with digitized museum artifacts, a grant from the Joyce Foundation to aid the Milwaukee Public Schools in implementing a knowledge portal for teacher professional development, and a grant from Harvard to explore applications of wireless handheld devices in higher education. Dede recently served as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Foundations of Educational and Psychological Assessment, a member of the U.S. Department of Education's Expert Panel on Technology, and a member of the International Steering Committee for the Second International Technology in Education Study. In 1996-97, he served as a Senior Program Director at the National Science Foundation. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Boston Tech Academy, an experimental small high school in the Boston Public School system, funded by the Gates Foundation. He has recently completed a co-edited volume on Scaling Up Success: Lessons Learned from Technology-based Educational Innovation, published by Jossey-Bass January, 2005.

Chris Dede's fundamental interest is the expanded human capabilities for knowledge creation, sharing, and mastery that emerging technologies enable. His teaching models the use of information technology to distribute and orchestrate learning across space, time, and multiple interactive media. His research spans emerging technologies for learning, infusing technology into large-scale educational improvement initiatives, policy formulation and analysis, and leadership in educational innovation. He is currently conducting funded studies to develop and assess learning environments based on modeling and visualization, online teacher professional development, high-bandwidth telementoring, wireless mobile devices for ubiquitous computing, and multiuser virtual environments. Dede also is active in policy initiatives, including creating a widely used State Policy Framework for Assessing Educational Technology Implementation and studying the potential of developing a scalability index for educational innovations. From 2001 to 2004, he served as chair of the Learning & Teaching area at HGSE.