Dr. Jan Hawkins (1952-1999) was a developmental psychologist with a cognitive, cultural, and social-interactionist orientation, and was well known for her respectful, humanistic conceptions of appropriate roles for using technology in K-12 learning environments. Her work illustrates the balance that can be achieved in recognizing the innovative, emergent properties of new technologies while simultaneously respecting the individuals and conditions of the learning environments in which these new technologies are being used. She also was concerned with how complex social systems interact with emerging technologies to provide or prevent access to information for various groups of people based on gender, race, and cultural and ethnic background. Her work helped researchers, practitioners, and policy makes alike to think critically about technologies and learning, encouraging them not to seek out technology as a panacea or avoid it as a deterministic influence. She was also exemplary in her nurturing of young research scholars in learning technologies, and has been a model for them through her research and leadership.
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Jan Hawkins, Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Vice President of the Education Development Center based in Newton, MA, and, until recently, Director of the EDC Center for Children and Technology in New York City, died on Tuesday, February 9, 1999. She was 47.
Jan was a developmental psychologist internationally recognized as one of the world's leading experts on education and technology. She was also a warm, generous and devoted mentor to her hundreds of friends and colleagues.
Jan was truly a pioneer in the field of technology in education. She was perhaps best known for her insistence that technology was no more than a useful tool to enhance processes of teaching and learning. She was often described as a leading proponent of "humanistic" uses of technology, and was interested in finding ways to use technology to bring about broad educational change.
Over two decades, Jan's work argued forcefully against technological determinism -- the pervasive idea that technologies, by themselves, can provide solutions to social problems. Most important, she stressed, was the human context of technology use -- the ways that teachers, students and others used computers to foster particular learning outcomes. Her first studies of classroom computing, conducted in the early 1980s, found that young children used computers in highly social and collaborative ways, and were not isolated by them in the ways early critics had warned. And her next studies, on the learning that occurred as youngsters mastered the programming language Logo (developed by MIT professor Seymour Papert) found that children developed key programming concepts only when teachers made these concepts an explicit part of their teaching and not, as Logo proponents had claimed, simply as a result of exposure to interactive technology. Both sets of studies found that the social and human context of computer use mattered greatly. With these and other studies Jan and her colleagues moved the educational community to think of technologies as powerful tools for the advancement of carefully chosen ends. In turn, this helped spark investigations, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, into the roles that technologies could play in school reform.
Jan's practical work focused on creating a nexus for three important fields: the research community; educators, both in practice and policy; and the technology development community, both private sector and nonprofit. She also was concerned with how complex social systems interact with emerging technologies in ways that provide or prevent access to information for various groups of people based on gender, race, and cultural and ethnic background.
Through her participation in numerous advisory boards and panels for national and international organizations, Jan continued to shape the way researchers, government and foundation officials and educators at every level thought about the roles that technologies might play in teaching and learning. Jan was the recipient of numerous research grants from such sources as the U.S. Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, Apple Computer Advanced Technology Group, IBM, and Nynex. Her research includes a variety of studies and projects she has conducted with schools, teachers, students, and in informal learning settings such as homes and museums. Jan served on national and international boards and task forces related to education and technology, including, for example, the White House Technology in Education Task Force of the President's Council of Advisors in Science and Technology, the
National Advisory Council of Scholastic, Inc., the chair of the Advisory Board of the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies of SRI International. She was a regular reviewer and advisor for federal agencies and foundation grant programs, an editor for a variety of journals including the Journal of the Learning Sciences, and was an editor of the Learning in Doing Series of Cambridge University Press. She was an advisor to numerous schools, school districts, states, and policy organizations such as Education Commission of the States. She was a reviewer on interactive learning environments for the National Science Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, and the Spencer Foundation.
Jan earned her B.A. in psychology and English from Tufts University (1973); and an M.Ph. in psychology and a Ph.D. in developmental psychology with a concentration in cognition, both from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (1987).
Some selected recent boards, task forces, and advisory groups Jan participated in are:
Board member, Beginning with Children Foundation, New York, NY
Board member, Kimball Union Academy, Meriden, New Hampshire
National Advisory Council, Scholastic, Inc., New York, NY
White House Technology in Education Task Force, President's Council
of Science and Technology Advisors, Washington D.C.
Technology in Education Task Force, National Council for
Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), Washington, D.C.
The World Bank, Technology in education advisor; Infodev Fund: Jamaica Program
Cambridge University Press. Editor, Learning in Doing Series (with Roy
Pea & John Seely Brown)
Editorial Board, Journal of the Learning Sciences
Editorial Board, International Journal of Computers for Mathematical
Learning
Consulting Editor, 1998 Review of Research in Education.
Reviewer: Interactive Learning Environments, National Science
Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Spencer Foundation
Advisor, The M Group, Bangkok, Thailand
Education Board, 7th Level
Education technology advisor, Hole in the Wall Gang Foundation
Co-chair, Program, Conference of the National Education Computing
Consortium, Boston, MA, 1995
Assistant chair, American Education Research Association meeting,
1993, Division C.
Teacher Participation chair, Computer Supported Collaborative
Learning Conference, 1997.
Task Force on Technology and Education, National Education Goals
Panel, 1994.
Education Commission of the States, Advisor to Chairman's (Governor
Bransted) Technology and Education Program, 1997-98.
Doctoral Consortium, Institute for the Learning Sciences, Northwestern
University 1996.
Advisory Board, Adult Literacy Media Alliance
Advisory Board, Asia Society.
Education Task Force of the Board of Trustees, American Museum of
Natural History, New York, NY
Urban Education Advisory Board, ASCD (Association for Supervision
and Curriculum Development) (1994-95).
Advisory board, Technology and education initiative, Council on
Economic Development, New York, NY(1995).