Elisabeth Sylvan
sylvan at media . mit . edu
Elisabeth received her PhD in Mitchel Resnick's Lifelong Kindergarten Group. She builds tools and environments that support social design activities and studies learning communities from a network perspective. For her thesis she developed a model of how learners collaborate by studying their communication and idea exchange in Online Communities of Creators (OCOCs) Based on her findings, she builds web and cellphone-based technologies for engaging children in understanding how they influenced and are influenced by others. These technologies include visual representation of children's own egocentric networks and survey systems that allow children to design their own social science research projects. In 2003 she completed her master's thesis, "Dealing with Distractions: Analyzing and Designing for Task Switching at Work" in Professor Dan Ariely's eRationality Group. She received her B.S. in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University in 1996.

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