Greetings! My name is Phil Tietjen. I’m currently the Director of Teaching Programs at North Carolina State University’s Graduate School . My academic interests generally coalesce around three key areas: emerging learning technologies, group cognition and active learning spaces.
I approach the word technologies in a very broad sense of the word, where it can include not only tools, but also emergent phenomena and practices such as Open Educational Resources, Open Pedagogy and Learning Tools Interoperability. Similarly, I’m interested in exploring how these emergent tools and phenomena can suggest new approaches to the design of online learning environments.
My interest in collaborative learning processes centers on how groups build shared understanding (e.g., intersubjectivity). This builds on Stahl’s work in Group Cognition that examines the dynamics of how groups jointly negotiate perspectives on ill-structured, complex problems. Rather than simply looking at whether a collaborative group experience was “successful” or not in its output, I’m intrigued by the intervening, socio-technical processes through which the group jointly organizes its work.
Another area of research interest is Active Learning Spaces that originally started with my work as a postdoc at Penn State’s Krause Innovation Studio. At the Krause Studio, I studied how classes used new, experimental spaces designed to situate the professor more as a facilitator and where students were engaged in more independent, peer-to-peer learning. Currently, I’m working on developing analytical frameworks for conceptualizing the activities that happen within these more horizontally structured spaces.
Contact: Email: ptietjen [at] gmail [dot] com | LinkedIn: Phil Tietjen
