[Purple-Blurb] Marina Bers on digital narrative & youth devlopment, today, 6pm

[Nick Montfort]

Today at 6pm in MIT’s room 14E-310
  The Purple Blurb series of readings and presentations on digital writing
   presents

   Marina Bers

associate professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development 
and adjunct associate professor in the Computer Science Department at 
Tufts University.

  # Please note: 14E is the east wing of building 14, which also houses
  # the Hayden Library, and is *not* the new and shiny building E14!

Her research involves the design and study of innovative learning 
technologies to promote positive youth development. At Tufts, Bers heads 
the interdisciplinary Developmental Technologies research group. Bers 
received the 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and 
Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor given by the U.S. government to 
outstanding investigators at the early stages of their careers. She also 
received a five year National Science Foundation (NSF) Young 
Investigator’s Career Award and the American Educational Research 
Associations (AERA) Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to 
Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies. Over the 
past fourteen years, Bers has conceived and designed diverse technological 
tools ranging from robotics to virtual worlds, from tangible programming 
languages to storytelling environments. She conducted studies after school 
programs, museums and hospitals, as well as schools in the US, Argentina, 
Colombia, Spain, Costa Rica and Thailand. She teaches seminars on learning 
technologies for educators and does consulting on ways to use technology 
to promote positive youth development. Her book “Blocks to Robots: 
Learning with Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom” has been 
published by Teacher’s College Press in 2008. Bers is from Argentina and 
did her undergraduate studies in Social Communication at Buenos Aires 
University. In 1994 she came to the US where she received a Master’s 
degree in Educational Media and Technology from Boston University and a 
Master of Science and PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory, where she worked 
with Seymour Papert.

-- 
-   Nick Montfort         nickm at nickm.com     http://nickm.com
--
-   Associate Professor of Digital Media
  -  Program in Writing & Humanistic Studies, MIT
--  77 Massachusetts Avenue, 14N-233, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307