Copyright ©Tatar 2006-2010
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, or at least to the amazing teachers and settings that valued 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, a member of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction and more recently affiliated with the Program for Woman and Gender Studies. Overall, from a platonic point of view, 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). But in fact, I am increasingly interested in the relationship between user and system values.
My undergraduate concentration (major) was English and American Literature and Language, a study that I took very seriously indeed. In some ways, my approach to research is still that of the poet I would have loved to have been. But particular thoughts influence me steadily over the years. One is Yeats' phrase "the mirror of malicious eyes" in Dialogue of Self and Soul. You see, in Yeats' vision, the mirror of malicious eyes distorts one's vision of oneself:
“How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?”
Malice, however, can give a person something definite to resist. The malaise of our times is indifference. In particular, since I came to Virginia Tech in 2003, I have become progressively fascinated with and horrified by the lack of sociality and pre-requisites to learning in many students. I have been working on approaches, sometimes technologically supported, to help students learn what they should have learned on the playground, as well as what they are supposed to be learning in university.