New Postdoctoral Fellows Join Research Project

The Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership and the Department of Curriculum and Instruction are pleased to welcome four Postdoctoral Fellows who are working on the project, "Assessing Complex Performance: A Postdoctoral Training Program Researching Students Writing in Digital Workspaces."

Bill Cope, PI on the grant says, "It is a great honor to be working with four of the smartest minds in a new generation of researchers investigating the productive connections between writing and assessment in emerging digital learning environments."

Dr. Elizabeth Bagley studies how new technologies change the way people think and learn. Elizabeth is particularly interested in the design, assessment, and implementation of virtual environmental education experiences. Her doctoral work in Educational Psychology and Environment and Resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined face-to-face and virtual mentoring conditions in an environmental education experience called Urban Science. Before coming to the University of Illinois, Elizabeth taught 8-12th grade science in South Louisiana and conducted sea turtle and coral reef research with the World Wide Fund For Nature on the Kenyan coast.

Dr. Shannon Carlin-Menter's research interests focus on the cognitive impact of multimedia authorship/composition and the development of cognitive tools to support higher-level thinking skills. Her Masters work focused on Educational Technology, Media Studies/Digital Arts and English Education. The combination of interests in writing development and educational technology led to her doctoral work in the Educational Psychology program at the University at Buffalo. Since completing her PhD in 2006, she has been involved with evaluation and research dealing with alcohol and smoking cessation and was the Director of Research & Evaluation for the New York State Smokers' Quitline and a co-investigator on numerous studies at Roswell Park Cancer Institute involving smoking cessation. She also taught graduate and undergraduate classes at the University at Buffalo and Buffalo State College in Educational Psychology, Child Development and Lifespan Development.

Dr. Alecia Marie Magnifico is a learning scientist whose research focuses on writing and its role in education. Alecia's studies engage with and seek to draw together research in multiple disciplines including educational psychology, curriculum and instruction, and composition and rhetoric. Her doctoral work, completed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, described three creative writing environments (one classroom, one extracurricular, and one online) and examined the confluence of designed participant structures, participants' motivations to write, and their available audiences. Her interests lie in extending this work by developing methods to account for creative production and theorizing about adolescents' literacies across contexts and media.

Justin Olmanson's work focuses on the use of new ethnographic writing in educational technology research as well as the design and development of open-ended digital writing and language exploration environments (FunWritr, Distributed Biography) using artificial intelligence, natural language processing, ambient computing, and distributed composition. Justin holds degrees in Spanish Literature and Linguistics (BA, Minnesota State University), Bilingual Education (M.Ed., University of Houston), Technology Innovation in Education (M.Ed., Harvard University), and Instructional Technology/Curriculum & Instruction (PhD, The University of Texas at Austin). Before coming to the University of Illinois, Justin taught in Houston public schools, coordinated programs for the UT Austin Distance Education/K-16 Education Center, and managed educational technology development projects for the UT Austin Center for Teaching and Learning.