Turadg Aleahmad, HCII

Advisors: Robert Kraut, Vincent Aleven

Turadg's broad interest is the use of technology to augment human thinking. He is currently focused on the potential of genetic media to evolve into rich ecologies of information. He stumbled into educational technology when in the summer of '98 at UC Berkeley he traded his job stocking books at Ned's Bookstore for a part-time position programming Java applets in the Graduate School of Education with Marcia Linn and James Slotta. First was Phil Bell's Sensemaker argumentation mapper, then rewriting the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (wise.berkeley.edu), then some pedagogically-minded drawing programs during his year abroad in France . He returned to a California flush with dot-com gold and became involved in a state-funded (CITRIS) initiative to bring WISE into high-ed, UC-WISE. For introductory CS, he created WebScheme, a system in which Scheme code integrates with the browser DOM, for interactive web-embedded Scheme instruction, along with a Scheme-based authoring system.

In 2003, Berkeley cofounded the TELS Center and Turadg was given the opportunity to put his experience to work developing a new edtech infrastructure for scratch. A key mission of the center is to develop the "education accelerator", a common resource for all education research that could not be achieved by any group alone. To accomplish this, he conceived and led the design of the SAIL and Pas open-source software projects.

In PIER, he is focused on Theme A, "Educational Research Requires a Continual Bi-directional Flow of Ideas and Challenges from Basic Laboratory Studies to Real-world Instructional Applications." He believes that within reach is a revolution in how educational materials are generated, distributed and revised -- that with the proper infrastructure, the whole globe can be a learning laboratory.

The functional nature of media is changing. Innovations like TiVo and the web have made content observant: while you watch TiVo, it watches you. Wikipedia and blogging have demonstrated the power of democratic media, in which the distinction between consumer and producer is blurred. Soon, students' "books" will read them. Turadg is excited by the potential for this shift to revolutionize how educational artifacts are designed, authored, shared, assessed and collaborated upon. He believes this is an enabling step to broad adoption of intelligent tutors and serious games.

Turadg amuses himself with new music, newsreading, philosophical conversation, living room dance parties, reading short books, and writing in the third person.

People might be surprised to know that "Turadg" is a globally unique identifier.