Graduate School of Education
...ings under Professor Decker Walker. Because of the school's proximity to Silicon Valley, I had the opportunity to learn about the most advanced technology and the application of selective tools in a range of different contexts. The interdisciplinary nature of my work -- a balance of theory, experimental methods, and technology deployment -- is best illustrated by my Masters project, "Designing a Distributed Learning Environment: Literary Institutions", which drew heavily upon my work as a curriculum deployment team intern at the Stanford Learning Lab. In the lab's Literary Institutions project, our team engaged 23 students at five Stanford Overseas Centers (Berlin, Florence, Oxford, Paris, and Santiago de Chile) in a comparative approach to explore literary institutions in the different host countries through the use of communication technologies in an integrated, Web-based learning environment. I specifically focused on learner-centered, project-based, and collaborative aspects of the project. I was able to witness and understand how different learning styles benefit from or are disadvantaged by the online environment: students who work well independently especially benefited by engaging in interesting research projects and used the online environment effectively to share their findings with others, whereas students who are used to work in a more structured physical environment found it difficult to focus in a distributed environment due to lack of time, social context, and the difficulty to organize groups over distance. I also saw the way the online tools helped facilitate the establishment of relationships and a sense of community among the learners, through which we concluded that the technology was most useful where students shared common interests and a strong desire to communicate across the international centers. However, while common interest in project topics led to initial bursts of collaboration online, sustaining that commitment into long-term work schedules proved more difficult. Particularly, communicating across different time zones, among other issues, impeded students' ability to effectively collaborate with peers at other centers. In addition, it was quite a challenge to discuss the styles of the various literary institutions such as public libraries, schools, universities, cinemas, and theaters, because these varied widely according to the cultures and countries in which they were located. These difficulties made me realize that I needed to not only develop software that would enhance individuals' learning and motivation and group collaboration, but would also be sensitive to other characteristics such as cultural differences between literary institutions, the network of institutions, and the role of global culture in the implementation of learning technology. In short, collaborative work in cross-institutional and -cultural situations must incorporate the style, content, and tone of local culture as well as different internet connections and bandwidths. After earning my Masters degree, I started a doctoral program in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, where I hoped to further explore issues of politics and management as they relate to program development in learning organizations. I was particularly interested in pursuing my interest in cultural perspectives on international organizations, which was no doubt first fostered by my international upbringing and experiences. As a project for one of my major classes, I chose to develop a summer program for incoming international students, entitled "Multicultural Village." The plan was subsequently adopted as a model for the International Student Institute at Northwestern, helping to acculturate students to their new surroundings. When I volunteered to support the implementation of the orientation program, I encountered substantial challenges in organizing structure and managing functions. These hurdles resulted from the characteristics of each culture involved in the group, broad cultural orientations and beliefs, distance between high- and low-status persons, and the inevitable "power play" between implementing organizations. I began to question important dimensions of culture that influence group dynamics, impacts of relationships among different cultural groups in society on intra- and inter-group relationships within organizations, and aspects of organizational dynamics and management practices that facilitate effective cross-cultural work groups. I began to research these issues with the guidance of Jean Egmon, an authority on learning organization and change. As I pursued this independent study and took an introductory organization class with her the following quarter, I became more attracted to various dimensions of organizational studies. In addition to changes in technology, globalization, and socially shared cognition in the current society, I have learned that other requirements for adaptation -- such as knowledge creation, organizational change, adaptive leadership, and integrity -- have intensified for organizations and individuals within the contexts of school reform, corporation transformation, and government reinvention. Through readings...