Dor Abrahamson Learning Sciences Mentorship

ISLS set up one-on-one early career mentorships. I was paired with Dor Abrahamson. These are the notes from our conversation.

On setting up a lab

Dor’s lab (and Paulo’s) is based on Uri’s model:
- Bring in grant money
- Bring top people
  - finding strong undergraduates is important
    - write to colleagues asking for candidates
    - grow your own?
A strong lab spirit is important
- Once a month, Dor’s group goes for lunch after lab meeting.
People like strong leadership which talks to growth

A department doesn’t need a clear vision. Wary of brand identity. People do best when left to their own devices.
But a lab does need a clear vision, expressible in its constructs and defensible via scholarship
Dor’s lab sits at the confluence of:
- Technology (HCI)
- Theory (4E)
- Method (MMLA)

Grantwriting is different from journals. In journals, you are trying to convinve people about the latest and greatest, and they’re read by experts. Grant review panels are learning about ideas for the first time–they are digesting. You want to be almost stating the obvious. Stepping back.
Harvard and Stanford are exceptional at bringing in grant money. They focus on stepping back, appropriating the ideas of others, and making themselves sound authoritative.
We tend to be tech-happy, but the questions should not be all about the technology. Don’t come across as espousing an ideology, come across as a dispassionate scholar, following the evidence.
DR-K12 is mre conservative.
Program officers have all the power. They want to feel like shepherds, enablers. Let them help you.

Center practice.
The argument should be that unwittingly, our esistemological beliefs have been constrained by our assessment methodologies–we didn’t know now to look at learning as it happens, so we focus on viewing learning after it has finished.
Now we have methodologies that enable us to think seriously of learning as a process.