Andrea Forte
I'm an assistant professor in the iSchool (College of Information Science and Technology) at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
I received my PhD from the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology in human-centered computing with a focus on social computing and learning sciences. My MLIS is from the School of Information at University of Texas at Austin.
I'm interested in how emergent uses of technology create opportunities for people to construct new knowledge together.
Publications by Andrea Forte (bibliography)
Forte, Andrea, Kittur, Niki, Larco, Vanessa, Zhu, Haiyi, Bruckman, Amy and Kraut, Robert E. (2012): Coordination and beyond: social functions of groups in open content production. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW12 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2012. pp. 417-426.
“We report on a study of the English edition of Wikipedia in which we used a mixed methods approach to understand how nested organizational structures called WikiProjects support collaboration. We first conducted two rounds of interviews with a total of 20 Wikipedians to understand how WikiProjects function and what it's like to participate in them from the perspective of Wikipedia editors. We then used a quantitative approach to further explore interpretations that arose from the qualitative data. Our analysis of these data together demonstrates how WikiProjects not only help Wikipedians coordinate tasks and produce articles, but also support community members and small groups of editors in important ways such as: providing a place to find collaborators, socialize and network; protecting editors' work; and structuring opportunities to contribute.”
© All rights reserved Forte et al. and/or ACM Press
Forte, Andrea, Antin, Judd, Bardzell, Shaowen, Honeywell, Leigh, Riedl, John and Stierch, Sarah (2012): Some of all human knowledge: gender and participation in peer production. In: Companion Proceedings of ACM CSCW12 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2012. pp. 33-36.
“The promise of peer production includes resources produced by volunteers and released freely for the world to use. Wikipedia and Open Source Software are famous examples of peer-produced projects. Anyone is free to participate, but not everybody does. Wikipedia aims to collect the "sum of all human knowledge", but only about 13% of editors on the site are female [3]. In Open Source Software, the percentage of female contributors has been estimated near 1% [4]. If women are not well represented among authors of the most widely accessed reference source on the planet, are important voices muted? Could these projects be even more impactful with more female participation? This panel includes experts in gender theory and open collaboration, activists, and representatives from peer-produced projects to discuss recent findings and trends in this complex and often contentious research space.”
© All rights reserved Forte et al. and/or ACM Press
Alevizou, Panagiota and Forte, Andrea (2010): Engaging with open education. In: Proceedings of the 2010 International Symposium on Wikis 2010. p. 30.
“This panel will address key issues and provide empirically-grounded insights on learning about, with, and through open educational resources (OER). Open educational resources are educational materials that are freely shared by those who seek to learn and those who seek to teach. OERs are viewed by many as a revolutionary idea that could create more accessible, equitable education on a global scale; yet, the benefits and challenges of OER adoption in practice are not yet understood. Many OER initiatives are pursuing a vision of education as a 'public good', and international policy agendas on education are shifting from the idea of simply providing access to content, towards the notion of creating 'Open Participatory Learning Ecosystems'; these efforts have outpaced our understanding of how educational systems behave when they become more open. Open education requires further empirical investigation. Each of the individuals on this panel brings expertise that speaks not only to understanding the potential value of OER, but also to understanding barriers and challenges of OER adoption. Speakers will cover issues on: * Advocacy, policy&development of OER * Social interfaces and the design of participation * Mentoring and peer learning in Open Education environments * Popular perceptions about OER, and attitudes towards sharing and creating OER content”
© All rights reserved Alevizou and Forte and/or their publisher
Forte, Andrea and Bruckman, Amy (2010): Citing, Writing and Participatory Media: Wikis as Learning Environments in the High School Classroom. In International Journal of Learning and Media, 1 (4) pp. 23-44.
“In this article we use the rhetorical notion of genre as an analytic lens for studying the use and impact of new media in schools. Genre pervades the scholastic life of students as they become adept practitioners of written performances. Our empirical studies investigate how creation and consumption of media are linked as high school students produce a public information resource in their science classes using a specially designed wiki. We found that, although institutional as- sessment regimes for both students and teachers inhibited collaboration and although the wiki tools were appropriated as single-author envi- ronments, the wiki, because it is an open, trans- parent medium, supported students in building a shared understanding of genre as they strug- gled with an unfamiliar rhetorical situation. As we describe the process by which students made sense of an assignment that served purposes be- yond test preparation and classroom assessment, we also demonstrate how writing on a public wiki was a particularly useful writing experience that brought about opportunities for reflection and learning. These opportunities include trans- forming the value of citation, creating a need to engage deeply with content, and providing both a need and a foundation for assessing informa- tion resources.”
© All rights reserved Forte and Bruckman and/or their publisher
Luther, Kurt, Flaschen, Matthew, Forte, Andrea, Jordan, Christopher and Bruckman, Amy (2009): ProveIt: a new tool for supporting citation in MediaWiki. In: Proceedings of the 2009 International Symposium on Wikis 2009. p. 43.
Forte, Andrea and Bruckman, Amy (2008): Scaling Consensus: Increasing Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance. In: Hawaiian International Conference of Systems Sciences January 5-9, 2008, Big Island, HI. .
Forte, Andrea and Bruckman, Amy (2008): Scaling Consensus: Increasing Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance. In: HICSS 2008 - 41st Hawaii International International Conference on Systems Science 7-10 January, 2008, Waikoloa, Big Island, HI, USA. p. 157.
Forte, Andrea and Bruckman, Amy S. (2007): Constructing text: Wiki as a toolkit for (collaborative?) learning. In: Proceedings of the 2007 International Symposium on Wikis 2007. pp. 31-42.
“Writing a book from which others can learn is itself a powerful learning experience. Based on this proposition, we have launched Science Online, a wiki to support learning in high school science classrooms through the collaborative production of an online science resource. Our approach to designing educational uses of technology is based on an approach to education called constructionism, which advocates learning by working on personally meaningful projects. Our research examines the ways that constructionism connects to collective models of knowledge production and learning such as Knowledge Building. In this paper, we explore ways that collaboration using wiki tools fits into the constructionist approach, we examine learning goals for youth growing up in a read-write culture, and we discuss preliminary findings in an ongoing year-long study of Science Online in the classroom. Despite the radically open collaboration afforded by wiki, we observe that many factors conspired to stymie collaborative writing on the site. We expected to find cultural barriers to wiki adoption in schools. Unexpectedly, we are also finding that the design of the wiki tool itself contributed barriers to collaborative writing in the classroom.”
© All rights reserved Forte and Bruckman and/or ACM Press
Bryant, Susan L., Forte, Andrea and Bruckman, Amy S. (2005): Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. In: GROUP05: International Conference on Supporting Group Work November 6-9, 2005, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. pp. 1-10.
“Traditional activities change in surprising ways when computer-mediated communication becomes a component of the activity system. In this descriptive study, we leverage two perspectives on social activity to understand the experiences of individuals who became active collaborators in Wikipedia, a prolific, cooperatively-authored online encyclopedia. Legitimate peripheral participation provides a lens for understanding participation in a community as an adaptable process that evolves over time. We use ideas from activity theory as a framework to describe our results. Finally, we describe how activity on the Wikipedia stands in striking contrast to traditional publishing and suggests a new paradigm for collaborative systems.”
© All rights reserved Bryant et al. and/or ACM Press
Forte, Andrea and Guzdial, Mark (2005): Motivation and Non-Majors in Computer Science: Identifying Discrete Audiences for Introductory Courses. In IEEE Transactions on Education, 48 (2) pp. 248-253.
Forte, Andrea and Guzdial, Mark (2004): Computers for Communication, Not Calculation: Media as a Motivation and Context for Learning. In: HICSS 2004 2004. .
Forte, Andrea (2003): Programming for communication: overcoming motivational barriers to computation for all. In: HCC 2003 - IEEE Symposium on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments 28-31 October, 2003, Auckland, New Zealand. pp. 285-286.
Show this list on your homepage
Changes to this page (author)
03 Apr 2012: Added03 Apr 2012: Added15 Nov 2011: Modified
05 Oct 2011: Modified
23 Aug 2011: Modified
23 Aug 2011: Added
02 Aug 2011: Added
02 Aug 2011: Added
02 Aug 2011: Modified
02 Aug 2011: Modified
03 Nov 2010: Added
03 Nov 2010: Added
22 Feb 2010: Modified
16 Jun 2009: Added
13 Jun 2009: Added
12 Jun 2009: Added
02 Feb 2009: Added
02 Feb 2009: Modified
02 Feb 2009: Added
02 Feb 2009: Modified
02 Feb 2009: Added
02 Feb 2009: Modified
12 May 2008: Added
12 May 2008: Added
11 Jun 2007: Added
Page Information
Page maintainer:
The Editorial TeamHow to cite/reference this page
URL: http://www.interaction-design.org/references/authors/andrea_forte.html
