Dr. Marcela Borge is an associate professor of Learning, Design, and Technology and a fellow of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the Pennsylvania State University. Her program of research focuses on understanding the ways that technology can help or hinder collective sense-making, socioemotional development, and empowerment. She uses technology to help people think about their own collaborative processes as objects of thought while learning about the power and potential of design. In this way she works to empower people to see themselves as problem solvers and designers of their own experiences. As part of this work, she has conducted in-depth analyses of how people across the life span learn to regulate their own collaborative processes and develop collaborative expertise in design and computing contexts. She has examined the development of collaborative expertise through laboratory, design-based, and fieldwork studies to investigate problems and identify communication patterns associated with higher-quality sense-making activity. In doing so, she has developed assessment frameworks to identify changes in the quality of collaborative sense-making, problems learners face, and ways they engage in collective regulation. She has designed, implemented, and evaluated software tools and technology-enhanced interventions that help people learn about and improve upon design ways of thinking and their own collaborative processes. She has also developed pedagogical models for developing young learners’ ability to learn about and regulate socioemotional processes in play-based, human-centered design contexts. Currently, she is working to devise new frameworks to help instructors use generative AI to support students’ development of collaborative competencies associated with complex sense-making activity.
Computer-supported collaborative learning, cognition and development, the design and evaluation of collaborative learning technologies, sociocultural theory, group cognition, human-computer interaction, emerging technologies, intelligent systems, play-based learning, technology enhanced learning, socio-metacognition.
