Copyright ©Tatar 2006
In high school, I was surprised to win an award for Intellectual Curiosity and have spent most of the time since trying to live up to it. As an undergraduate at Harvard in the late 70s, I was introduced to Cognitive Science and fell in love with the new world it opened---which I saw as organized around education and learning, oh, and technology. As a Senior Software Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation and a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC, I wrote a textbook on the Lisp programming language and conducted research in the design and implementation of novel educational and communication technologies. These years featured work on Colab, a seminal project in the area of Computer-Supported Collaborative Work. My research at that time also encompassed using video-based observation as a methodology in design practice.
One outcome of the research was that I realized that when exploring new technologies, we really ought to know more about how people are affected by those aspects of interaction that people in Western culture are likely to ignore or downplay because they are outside of our cultural models: interdependence, mutual attention, and affect. I went off to gain the skills to pursue this issue; my thesis work in psychology at Stanford explored the effects of having a preoccupied listener on social interaction. I found that social scientists frequently ask questions which differ subtly but importantly from those which designers want answered, primarily because their scope of action is limited differently.
In general, I am a methodological pragmatist and have used physiological, interview, survey and experimental techniques as well as observation to conduct research in a range of topics. As a Cognitive Scientist in the Center for Technology and Learning at SRI International, I began investigations into whether, when, and how individual, interpersonal, and community aspects of being interact with technologies to aid learning.
I am currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Psychology at Virginia Tech and a member of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction. Overall, my work can be thought of as falling into three categories: Making Mechanisms (designing new ways to do things with technology), Making Meaning (analyzing complex new systems), and Making Methods (creating new ways of coming to know about phenomena of interest). Recent mechanisms focus on the potential of handheld connectivity to help classroom learning. Recent meaning includes the analysis of online argumentation and emotion. Recent mechanisms focus on the analysis of online communities for teacher professional development.