Northwestern University
An important component of school change is professional community. Each community has its own norms and way of work. Innovation must respect these. In this talk we will discuss how collaborative design partnerships between schools and universities can allow the richness of local context to support innovative curriculum design. We also describe how these partnerships are professionalizing and transformative for both school and university actors.
Louis M. Gomez received a BA. in Psychology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley. Gomez is one of the co-directors of the NSF-sponsored Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools, a partnership made up of Chicago Public Schools, Detroit Public Schools, University of Michigan, and Northwestern University. The Center is dedicated to collaborative research and development with urban schools that will bring the current state-of-the-art in computing and networking technologies into pervasive use in schools to integrally support science and other curriculum. Gomez's primary interest is in working with school communities to create curriculum that supports school reform while connecting schools to broad communities of practice beyond school.
Prior to joining the Faculty at Northwestern Gomez was director of Human-Computer Systems Research at Bellcore in Morristown New Jersey. Over the last several years he has also pursued an active research program investigating techniques that improve human use of information retrieval systems and techniques which aid in the acquisition of complex computer-based skills.