About

I'm an assistant professor in the iSchool (College of Information Science and Technology) at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

I study and design technologies that create opportunities for people to construct new knowledge together. I’m particularly interested in new literacies that are required for successful participation in an increasingly technologically mediated society. Sometimes my projects involve designing systems that support new kinds of activities. Other times I study the ways people adapt to and appropriate existing technologies.

I received my PhD from the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology in human-centered computing with a focus on social computing and learning sciences. My MLIS is from the School of Information at University of Texas at Austin.

Useful Info

Curriculum Vitae

email: aforteATdrexelDOTedu
twitter: andicat

College of Info Sci/Tech
Drexel University
3141 Chestnut
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Projects

New Information Literacies & Assessable Design, Primary Investigator

In this NSF-funded project, my students and I are examining how people assess collaboratively authored information sources such as Wikipedia and Ancestry.com and how sites that support distributed production can be designed to better support assessment.

openHTML, Primary Investigator

In this NSF-supported design-based research project, our team is investigating the impact of beginning web development experiences on learners' understandings of Web technologies, infrastructure, and computational concepts.

With Susan Wiedenbeck (Co-PI) and Tom Park (PhD student).

ExCITe Center, Research Co-Leader

drexel.edu/excite

We have established a new multi-institutional center to spearhead research and re-invent education at the nexus of science, technology, and the arts: the Expressive and Creative Interaction Technologies (ExCITe) Center, led by Drexel University with several regional partners.

With Youngmoo Kim and Adam Fontecchio (Directors).

Youth and Social Search, Co-PI

youthonline.ischool.drexel.edu/

In this IMLS-funded project we seek to investigate the social search habits of high school students, with emphasis on how youth interact in social network sites to ask and answer questions of their peers and others.

with Denise Agosto (PI), Michael Dickard (PhD student), and Rachel Magee (PhD student).

School and Public Library Social Media Practice and Policy, Co-PI

With IMLS support, we are conducting a national survey of public and school libraries about their use of and policies on social technologies to support library services to youth.

With Denise Agosto (PI), Michael Dickard (PhD student), and Rachel Magee (PhD student).

Papers, etc.

(pdf) - Zarro, Mike, Catherine Hall and Andrea Forte (2013) Wedding Dresses and Wanted Criminals: Pinterest.com as an Infrastructure for Repository Building. Proceedings of AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) Boston, MA

(pdf) Park, Thomas, Swathi Jagannath, Ankur Saxena, Susan Wiedenbeck and Andrea Forte (2013) openHTML: Designing a Transitional Web Editor for Novices. Poster. ACM Conference n Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).

(pdf - preprint) Forte, Andrea and Cliff Lampe. (2013). Defining, Understanding and Supporting Open Collaboration: Lessons from the Literature. American Behavioral Scientist 57(5): 535-547 (browse full issue).

(pdf) Wyche, Susan P., Andrea Forte and Sarita Y. Schoenebeck. (2013). "Hustling Online: Understanding Consolidated Facebook Use in an Informal Settlement in Nairobi," To appear in Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'13), Paris, France. * best paper honorable mention *

(pdf) Wyche, Susan, Sarita Schoenebeck and Andrea Forte (2013). "Facebook is a Luxury": An Exploratory Study of Social Media Use in Rural Kenya. Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), San Antonio, TX, 2013.

(pdf) Forte, Andrea, Denise Agosto, Michael Dickard and Rachel Magee. (2013). Teenagers' Online Question Asking and Answering Behavior. Position Paper. Workshop on Social Media Question Asking. CSCW 2013 San Antonio, TX.

(pdf) Forte, Andrea and Thomas Park. (2012). How People Assess Cooperatively Authored Information Resources. Poster. Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym '12), Linz, Austria.

(pdf) Forte, Andrea, Melissa Humphreys and Thomas Park. (2012). Grassroots professional development: How teachers use Twitter. Proceedings of the AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). Dublin, Ireland. * best paper nomination *

(pdf) Magee, Rachel M., Robin Naughton, Patri O'Gan, Andrea Forte, and Denise E. Agosto. Social Media Practices and Support in U.S. Public Libraries and School Library Media Centers. Poster. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD.

(pdf) - Willever-Farr, Heather, Andrea Forte and Lisl Zach. (2012). Cashing in on family: The influence of private companies on online family history construction. Position Paper. Workshop: Heritage Matters: Designing for Current and Future Values Through Digital and Social Technologies. CHI 2012 Austin. TX.

(pdf) Forte, Andrea, Niki Kittur, Vanessa Larco, Haiyi Zhu, Amy Bruckman, Robert Kraut. (2012). Coordination and beyond: Social functions of groups in open content production. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2012, Seattle, WA. pp. 417-426.

(pdf) Forte, Andrea (panel organizer), Judd Antin, Shaowen Bardzell, Leigh Honeywell, John Riedl, Sarah Stierch. (2012). Some of all Human Knowledge: Gender and participation in peer production. Panel. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2012, Seattle, WA. pp. 417-426.

(pdf) Willever-Farr, Heather, Lisl Zach, and Andrea Forte. (2012). Tell Me About My Family: A Study of Cooperative Research on Ancestry.com. Proceedings of the iConference, 2012. Toronto, Canada. pp. 303-310.

(email me) - Agosto, D. E., Forte, A., & Magee, R. (2012). Cyberbullying and teens: What YA librarians can do to help. Young Adult Library Services, 10(1): 38-43.

(email me)- Lampe, Cliff, Paul Resnick, Andrea Forte, Sarita Yardi, Dana Rotman, Todd Marshall, Wayne Lutters. (2010) Educational priorities for technology-mediated social participation. IEEE Computer. November, 2010, pp.1-8.

(pdf)- Berland, Leema and Andrea Forte. (2010). When Students Speak, Who Listens? Constructing Audience in Classroom Argumentation . Proceedings of the International Conference of the Learning Sciences. pp 428-435.

(pdf)- - Forte, Andrea and Amy Bruckman. (2009). Writing, Citing, and Participatory Media: Wikis as Learning Environments in the High School Classroom. International Journal of Learning and Media. 1(4). pp 23-44.

More…

Teaching

INFO 611 - The Design of Interactive Systems - Winter & Spring 2013

INFO 215 - Social Aspects of Information Systems - Fall 2012

PhD Advising

Thomas Park
Heather Willever-Farr
Rachel Magee
Michael Dickard
Nazanin Andalibi

Events

April 27-May 2, Paris, Fr: CHI

June 11, ExCITe Center, Drexel: Symposium on Urban Informatics

June 16-18, Monterey, CA: HCIC

June 24-27, Madison, WI: CSCL

Past Events…

Community Engagement

Web Workshops: As part of the openHTML project, our team developed a web building workshop for young people in West Philly neighborhoods of Powelton and Mantua.