I am the Postdoctoral Scholar in the Krause Innovation Studio at The Pennsylvania State University. If you are unfamiliar with the Krause Innovation Studio, it was developed to support innovative teaching in resident instruction at Penn State. The main space is open for all UP students to work collaboratively on course projects or research. The Studio also provides a place for faculty to have teaching consultations, engage in research, and teach courses in our Learn Lab classroom. On a typical day at the Studio, you will find me meeting with faculty or staff, writing, or working with one of three teams:
- our development team (for learning space and video data collection tools and protocols);
- our literature review team (for research on learning spaces and technologies); and
- our writing team (for the Krause Innovation Studio blog).
My research broadly focuses on design and learning technologies. Within that area I am engaged in two main lines of research:
- designs and affordances of spaces and technologies (which includes my work at the Krause Innovation Studio), and
- debugging as a practice of peer technological support (which builds off of my dissertation).
In the first line of research I am working with Koun Choi and Dr. Scott McDonald on a study of students’ experiences of group work in an open, collaborative, and hyper-public learning space. I am spearheading the design of a data collection tool for learning spaces research. Also, Scott and I are both co-PIs on a project led by Dr. Nicole Olcese, EDUCATE director, that examines the affordances of tablets in supporting a one-to-one initiative in preservice teacher education. In the second line of research I focus on how peers support one another when designing learning technology.
I have a B.S. in Computer Science and a M.A.T. in Secondary Education & Mathematics from The College of New Jersey, and a Ph.D. in Learning, Design, and Technology from Penn State. I spent a year teaching K-8 Music in Loretto, PA and Study Skills at Saint Francis University prior to returning for my Ph.D. degree. At Penn State, I have served as instructor of multiple design courses including co-instructor of the Learning Design Studio with Dr. Simon Hooper. I am an avid soccer fan/player. And, my wife Karina and I have a son, Nathan, who is two years old.
In Disruptive Technologies, I am the resident more-knowledgeable-other (I hesitate to use the word ‘expert’ in any context) in Design Scholarship. Or in other words, I am a Design Scholar. I focus on a human-centered design and approach to teaching. A good example of this is a recent review of my teaching effectiveness from one of my previous students: “Dr. Rook has a human-centered approach to teaching. He empathized with each one of us, knew our abilities and challenges, and was able to bring the best out of all of us.”