About me
I love learning
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve enjoyed learning about people.
Wanting to learn about people is what got me into learning languages. Learning a bit of someone’s language is a great way to show you’re interested in them.
And then it turned out that languages are super cool, which brought me to linguistics. While studying linguistics, I had the opportunity to live in Japan, South Korea, and China.
Linguistics inspired me to study education and pedagogy, which ultimately led me to teach Mandarin at an international school in Vietnam for 5 years.
While I was teaching, I started to get curious about how we measure learning. That sparked my desire to get an MS in computational linguistics.
It wasn’t a huge leap to go from computational linguistics to software engineering. I did an internship at McLean Hospital, and then I worked for 5 years at Adobe.
Once I got comfortable building software, I started to wonder how we know what to build and whether what we’re building is useful. That inspired me to learn about UX.
So that’s brought me right back to learning about people!
I build things with people, for people
I enjoy making software that serves people and their communities.
Concretely, that means that I’m not only interested in writing code – I also like being part of the research process.
That said, I do enjoy writing code, and I write a lot of it. I’m especially happy writing code on cross-functional teams who are committed to learning from each other, and from the users we serve, in a psychologically-safe environment.
There’s a ton of opportunity in the space between the extremes of
“users don’t know what they want”
vs.
“the customer is always right.”
I don’t think there’s one tool or process that can guarantee a strong sense of community. That said, I have learned a lot from Systems Thinking and Design Justice, and from the many skilled and compassionate facilitators I’ve had the privilege to work with over the years.
Anyone can learn anything
I love seeing people experience the transformation from
“I can’t do this!”
to
“I can do this!”
People with an affinity and an aptitude for a certain kind of problem-solving tend to struggle to communicate with people who think differently. A big part of my work is trying to break down those barriers.
I’m a software engineer who didn’t start out as “a computer person”, and I’m a language teacher who often works with learners who don’t believe they’re “language people.” Really, though, there’s no such thing as “computer people,” “language people,” “math people,” and so on. With the right approach, and the right environment of mutual trust and partnership, anyone can learn anything.
We can’t rush the learning process, and it’s not always easy! For that reason, I’m interested in research related to cognitive load. I don’t think learning should always feel like a game, or that it should be effortless. But it should be satisfying, and it should help us feel like we’re moving towards being our best selves and growing in community with each other.
Data doesn’t speak for itself
My research approaches are based in my background in linguistics, education, and computer science.
I prefer mixed-methods research which gives equal weight to qualitative and quantitative approaches. In practice, I tend to advocate more vocally for qualitative research, because I find it’s sometimes overlooked. But in the end, it’s a matter of asking the right questions in the right way, and choosing the most appropriate tools to explore the answers.
My favorite question is: “how does learning work?”
We can learn so much from each other. I’m most enthusiastic about questions related to what learning is and how it works.
In the tech world, I often find myself asking:
• How do we learn about the communities who will be impacted by what we build?
• How do we ask the right questions about our users? How do we learn the answers?
• How do we encourage learning on our teams, so that we can grow together?
And when it comes to education and pedagogy:
• How do we create a community based on mutual respect and trust, so that learning can happen?
• How do we know that we’ve learned something? Why do we sometimes feel like we’ve learned something, even though we haven’t?
• How do we give and respond to feedback?