Kevin O'Neill
Associate Professor, Education and Technology
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Let me play the fool; William Shakespeare, A Merchant of Venice I,I |
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Kevin O'Neill Associate Professor, Education and Technology
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A Short Career History |
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It was a windy road to the Faculty of Education at SFU. After completing my Ph.D. in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, I took up a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT). There I worked with the CSILE/Knowledge Building team, directed by Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Berieter, to put my dissertation work on telementoring into action in Knowlege-Building classrooms. This work was generously supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation under a fellowship from their Cognitive Studies in Educational Practice program, and by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Extensions of this work were funded by the Office of Learning Technologies, Human Resources Development Canada. |
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After leaving OISE/UT, I spent a year working with Alan Lesgold and Lauren Resnick's team on the NetLearn project at LRDC, University of Pittsburgh, helping to design web-based tools to support the Institute for Learning's work on professional development. |
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Software Projects
Since part of my background is in Computing Science, I like to contribute to the field by creating software that I believe will be useful to educators, but that is unlikely to be developed in the corporate world. My first contribution of this kind was back in graduate school, I was part of a team of researchers working on the CoVis Project, an educational networking testbed project supported by the National Science Foundation, among others.
| As part of CoVis I did a lot of work on a piece of educational groupware called the Collaboratory Notebook. As I also prototyped a WWW service called the CoVis Mentor Database, to support on-line mentoring (also called "telementoring" or "e-mentoring") for K-12 students. For a variety of reasons having to do with the nature of schools, curricula and growing up, orchestrating distant, long-term mentoring relationships between schoolkids and knowledgable adults winds up being a lot harder to do (or to do well) than you might expect. It's equally hard to evaluate. If you're interested in these sorts of issues, you might want to peruse some of my writings, linked below. |
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Some years ago, some of my graduate students and I produced a new piece of software to support telementoring programs, the Telementoring Orchestrator. This is a much-enhanced successor to the CoVis Mentor Database, developed under contract for Human Resources Development Canada. It is available free for noncommercial use. Find out more about it. |
More recently, I collaborated with colleague Dr. Özlem Sensoy and several experienced teachers to produce and evaluate a telementored unit for the BC Social Studies 11 curriculum called "Compassionate Canada?" This work was generously funded by the Canadian Council on Learning. We are busy working on publications from this work now.
Personal History
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I am originally from St. Catharines, Ontario. If you've ever driven to Toronto along the Queen Elizabeth Way, you've passed through it. You may even have stopped for gas or a Tim Horton's doughnut there, and met one of our friendly Ontario Provincial Police. St. Catharines is mostly known for its innumerable coffee shops and pizza parlors, and for a yearly rowing meet called the Royal Henley Regatta. |
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One of the under-appreciated gems of St. Catharines is Brock University, where I spent several years getting a great education, largely to the credit of the Liberal Studies Program. |
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These days when not working, I am mostly with my with my wife Laura (another Learning Sciences grad) and our two adorable, very energetic and whip-smart children in our home on Burnaby mountain. Together we enjoy being silly, reading, playing "let's pretend" games, and building with LEGO. My son, 8, enjoys documentaries about science and nature, and has a strong fascination with flight. My daugher, 5, is in the princess-and-pony phase right now. She loves to draw.
O'Neill, D. K. (2009). Designs that fly: Evaluating the aeronautics analogy for design research in education. Paper presented to SIG-Learning Sciences at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA, April 2009.
O'Neill, D. K., Asgari, M. and Dong, Y. (2009). “It wasn’t what I expected”: Examining trade-offs between planned outcomes and perceptions of success in a formal mentoring program. Paper presented to SIG-Mentorship and Mentoring Practices at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA, April 2009.
O’Neill, D.K. and Weiler, M.J. (2006). Cognitive tools for understanding history: What more do we need? Journal of Educational Computing Research 35(2), 179-195.
Asgari, M., & O'Neill, D. K. (2005). What do they mean by “success”? Examining mentees’ perceptions of success in a curriculum-based telementoring program. In J. Pascarelli & F. Kochan (Eds.), Creating Successful Telementoring Programs. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.
O'Neill, D. K., Weiler, M. J., & Sha, L. (2005). Software support for online mentoring programs: A research-inspired design. Mentoring & Tutoring, 13(1), 109-131.
O'Neill, D. K. (2004). Building social capital in a knowledge-building community: Telementoring as a catalyst. Interactive Learning Environments, 12(3), 179-208.
O'Neill, D. K., & Harris, J. B. (2004). Bridging the perspectives and developmental needs of all participants in curriculum-based telementoring programs. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 37(2), 111-128.
O'Neill, D. K., & Polman, J. L. (2004). Why educate "little scientists"? Examining the potential of practice-based scientific literacy. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 41(3), 234–266.
O’Neill, D.K., Sohbat, E., Martin, A., Asgari, M., Lort, M., Sha., L. (2003). Sharing accountability through sharing our accounts: Piloting an on-line community for high school history learning. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL.
O’Neill, D.K., Weiler, M., Sha., L. (2003). The Telementoring Orchestrator: Research, design and implementation. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL.
O'Neill, D.K. (2001). Knowing when you've brought them in: Scientific genre knowledge and communities of practice. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 10(3), 223-264.
O'Neill, D.K., Abeygunawardena, H., Perris, K, and Punja, Z. (2000). The Telementor's Guidebook: A field guide to supporting student inquiry on-line. Final report of Office of Learning Technologies project #89116. Ottawa: Human Resources Development Canada.
O'Neill, D.K. and Scardamalia, M. (2000). Mentoring in the open: A Strategy for supporting human development in the knowledge society. Paper to be presented at ICLS 2000: International Conference on the Learning Sciences, Ann Arbor, MI, June 14-17, 2000.
O'Neill, D.K. and Gomez, L.M. (1998). Sustaining Mentoring Relationships On-line. Paper presented at CSCW 98: ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Seattle, WA, Nov. 14-18, 1998.
O'Neill, D. K. & Gomez, L. (1994). The Collaboratory Notebook: A distributed knowledge-building environment for project-enhanced learning. In T. Ottmann & I. Tomek (Eds.), Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 1994: Proceedings of Ed-Media '94 (pp. 416-423). Charlottesville, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.
Contact
E-mail: koneill-at-sfu-dot-ca
Snail Mail:
Faculty of Education
Simon Fraser University
8888 University Drive
Burnaby, British Columbia
Canada V5A 1S6
Phone: 778-782-3476
Fax: 778-782-3203
