Suthers, Daniel D

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10125/2513

Dan Suthers is a professor in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, where he directs the Laboratory for Interactive Learning Technologies (http://lilt.ics.hawaii.edu/). Dr. Suthers obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts (1979) from Kansas City Art Institute, studied Psychology at the graduate level at Northern Arizona University, 1982-1985, and then earned M.S. (1988) and Ph.D. (1993) degrees in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts.

Subsequently he worked at the Learning Research and Development Center of the University of Pittsburgh before coming to the University of Hawai‘i. Dr. Suthers' research is generally concerned with cognitive, social and computational perspectives on designing and evaluating software for learning, collaboration, and community. His current foci include:

Social affordances for “online communities”: Addressing the analytic gap between microanalyses and aggregate analyses to identify significant interactions and understand how interpersonal ties and community structures are technologically embedded, how ideas spread, and how participants discover synergistic value in socio-technical systems.
Uncovering how participants appropriate multiple notational tools in computer workspaces for intersubjective meaning-making, and the roles of language-based and visual/symbolic representations.
Representational affordances for computer supported collaborative learning. Specifically, designing software interfaces to enable learners to construct, discuss, and manipulate representations of their evolving knowledge, and studying how the notations used in these interfaces affect discourse between learners and learning outcomes.

In addition to selected laboratory studies, he has worked with diverse applications including middle to high school geosciences, post-secondary computer science distance education (via asynchronous learning networks), collaborative professional development of adult educators engaged in systemic reform, and informal science education.

Dr. Suthers is the co-founder and associate editor for the International Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. He is also on the editorial board for the Journal of Interactive Learning Environments, Springer book series on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, and the International Journal of the Learning Sciences. Dr. Suthers is co-founder and formerly associate executive editor for Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 133

A framework for conceptualizing, representing, and analyzing distributed interaction
(Springer, 2010-03) Suthers, Daniel D.; Dwyer, Nathan; Medina, Richard; Vatrapu, Ravi
The relationship between interaction and learning is a central concern of the learning sciences, and analysis of interaction has emerged as a major theme within the current literature on computer supported collaborative learning. The nature of technology-mediated interaction poses analytic challenges. Interaction may be distributed across actors, space, and time, and vary from synchronous, quasi-synchronous, and asynchronous, even within one data set. Often multiple media are involved and the data comes in a variety of formats. As a consequence, there are multiple analytic artifacts to inspect and the interaction may not be apparent upon inspection, being distributed across these artifacts. To address these problems as they were encountered in several studies in our own laboratory, we developed a framework for conceptualizing and representing distributed interaction. The framework assumes an analytic concern with uncovering or characterizing the organization of interaction in sequential records of events. The framework includes a media independent characterization of the most fundamental unit of interaction, which we call uptake. Uptake is present when a participant takes aspects of prior events as having relevance for ongoing activity. Uptake can be refined into interactional relationships of argumentation, information sharing, transactivity, and so forth. for specific analytic objectives. Faced with the myriad of ways in which uptake can manifest in practice, we represent data using graphs of relationships between events that capture the potential ways in which one act can be contingent upon another. These contingency graphs serve as abstract transcripts that document in one representation interaction that is distributed across multiple media. This paper summarizes the requirements that motivate the framework, and discusses the theoretical foundations on which it is based. It then presents the framework and its application in detail, with examples from our work to illustrate how we have used it to support both ideographic and nomothetic research, using qualitative and quantitative methods. The paper concludes with a discussion of the framework’s potential role in supporting dialogue between various analytic concerns and methods represented in CSCL.
Management of uncertainty in medicine.
(1987) Cohen, P.; Day, D.; deLisio, J.; Greenberg, M.; Kjeldsen, R.; Suthers, Daniel D.; Berman, P.
Knowledge primitives for tutoring systems.
(1988) Woolf, B.; Murray, T.; Suthers, Daniel D.; Schultz, K.
Providing multiple views of reasoning for explanation.
(1988) Suthers, Daniel D.
Knowledge-based environments for learning and teaching.
(1991) Woolf, B.; Soloway, E.; Clancey, W.; VanLehn, K.; Suthers, Daniel D.
Automated explanation for educational applications.
(1991) Suthers, Daniel D.
A task-appropriate hybrid architecture for explanation.
(1991) Suthers, Daniel D.
Steps from explanation planning to model construction dialogues.
(1992) Suthers, Daniel D.; Woolf, B.; Cornell, M.
Report on the AAAI-91 workshop on comparative analysis of explanation planning architectures.
(1992) Suthers, Daniel D.
Answering student queries: functionality and mechanisms.
(1992) Suthers, Daniel D.

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