Amy Bruckman taps Internet’s educational potential to develop Web communities

By Maria M. Lameiras

Gary Meek

School systems need to give teachers time to learn to use computers and the Internet in innovative ways, says Amy Bruckman.

hen Amy S. Bruckman first encountered the fledgling Internet in the early 1990s, she was fascinated by the educational potential of the World Wide Web.

A physics graduate of Harvard University working on her doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bruckman had been doing research on video systems. The Internet changed that.

To Bruckman, the new technology fit in naturally with the educational theory of constructionism—the idea that people learn best when they are participating in something that is personally meaningful to them—the theory on which all of Bruckman’s research was based.

“I did a class paper on the sociology of online communities and decided it was so much more interesting than video systems,” says Bruckman, an assistant professor with the College of Computing. “Not that there’s anything wrong with video—but there was clearly something exciting going on there.”

That first class paper began the research that has earned Bruckman a place on the MIT Technology Review’s list of Top 100 innovators under age 35, a compilation of people voted most likely to be major technological innovators in the next century.

Now Bruckman has developed a number of online communities and is teaching others to tap the educational potential of Web communities through the Electronic Learning Communities Research Group (ELC) in the College of Computing. ELC focuses on the design of communities on the Internet.

The first community Bruckman founded was MediaMOO, a professional community for media researchers.

“The technology was so new at that point, that there was nowhere for people to discuss it, and people interested in the future of the Internet met there,” Bruckman says.

Next came MOOSE Crossing, a text-based virtual learning world for kids 8 to 13 that focuses on helping kids learn reading, writing, creativity and computer-programming skills.

That community, which opened to the public in October 1995, now has about 400 members—from individual kids who participate from home to an entire class in an English boarding school whose pupils log-on to the community as their after-dinner creative activity. The class interacts with a class of kids from Los Angeles who participate during their regular school day and whose time in the community overlaps with their English friends because of the time difference.

The virtual world is entirely made up of text and encourages learning and interaction among the kids to help them learn from each other as well as from adults.

“We try to get kids asking questions of each other, not just of adults, and to get them excited about learning from each other—learning because they are engaged by what they are learning, not just to get a grade,” Bruckman says. “These kids do fabulous things. A lot of adults are surprised that these kids are doing object-oriented programming, but it comes much more naturally to them. And kids just don’t get why adults find it hard.”

The Bruckman File

Born: December 21, 1965, New York City. Education:BS, physics, Harvard University, 1987; PhD, Media Arts & Sciences in Epistemology & Learning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997. Achievements and Honors:Named one of Technology Review magazine’s list of Top 100 innovators under age 35. Personal: Engaged to Peter Weimann, a materials science engineer with Lucent Technologies who designs codings for fiber optics. Leisure Interests:Hiking, Snow Skiing, cruising Internet auction site ebay.com looking for kitschy, 1950s-era McCoy pottery for her mom.

Since Bruckman came to Tech in September 1997, the ELC and its members have developed a number of other research projects as well, including:

• AquaMOOSE 3D, a multi-user, graphical game-construction kit designed to support mathematical, artistic and computational learning. It is being spearheaded by students Jason Elliott, Lizzie Edwards, Rodney Walker and Stuart Jeff.
  
  
• American Timewarp, where children interview senior citizens to contribute to a growing database of oral history, developed by doctoral student Jason Ellis.
  
  
• The Turing Game, a game that explores issues of identity online, which currently has about 8,000 users in 70 countries and all seven continents, “including some guys at a research station in Antarctica who are totally hooked,” said Bruckman. Doctoral student Josh Berman is heading the program research on The Turing Game.
  
  
• IRC Francais, a project looking at foreign language learning in a real-time, text-based environment, which is being developed by master’s student Jim Hudson.
  
  

Bruckman feels the research she is doing and that is being done by the ELC will help address some of the stereotypes people hold about people who communicate via the Internet.

“There is as much diversity in online environments as there is in people’s reading preferences—there is something for everyone, and I think we will find ourselves involved in the Internet on some level in the future,” she says.

In terms of future research, Bruckman says she would like to rigorously study “what it means to do education online.”

“It needs to go beyond just giving ’Net connections to teachers. No one’s done enough systematic research on how to use the Internet in education,” Bruckman says. “School systems just throw the technology to teachers and don’t tell them a darn thing about it. That’s not going to work. There’s more to innovation than just giving people equipment.”

School systems need to develop a complete curriculum for the use of computers and the Internet that takes into account the workload and time constraints already besetting teachers.

“It’s kind of putting the cart before the horse: paying to put equipment in the school before teachers learn to use it. And school systems need to give teachers the time to really learn how to use it in innovative ways and to pay them to learn it.”