Plenary Speaker
Barron is an Associate Professor at the School of Education at Stanford, is a faculty co-lead of the LIFE center, and directs the YouthLAB research group (http://www.stanford.edu/group/youthlab). She studies social processes of learning in and out of school with a focus on how digital technologies can serve as a catalyst to learning across settings and time. She documents the evolution of interest-based activities, mapping children’s learning to reveal the networks of partners and resources that have supported learning. These methods were further developed in a three year grant funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur in 2006 Foundation that followed students longitudinally as they worked with mentors to develop their capacity to create through activities such as game design, robotics, and digital movie making. A special focus of this work was articulating relationships between learner pathways and programmatic catalysts for creation. Recent work investigates how networked technologies can generate interest and expertise development among middle school students learning to become citizen scientists and how digital media is used in families to support young children’s learning.
