ABOUT ME
I came to learning technology through teaching.
Before I was studying AI-mediated learning, immersion, and learning analytics, I was teaching language and academic literacies. That path still shapes how I work: start with people, understand the activity, and then ask what technology changes.
Researcher
Designer
Educator
HOW I GOT HERE
A path through teaching, design, and research.
01 · TEACH
Learning began with the human.
I spent years working internationally as a language educator. Teaching across cultural and institutional contexts made learning feel less like content delivery and more like participation, communication, confidence, and design.
02 · BUILD
Design became a way to ask better questions.
Instructional design and immersive learning gave me a way to shape the conditions for learning directly, to build an experience, observe what changed, and revise both the intervention and the questions behind it.
03 · STUDY
Research connected experience to evidence.
At Florida State University, I completed a Ph.D. in Instructional Systems and Learning Technologies and began connecting design questions to cognitive, behavioral, and computational evidence about how people learn.
WHAT CONNECTS THE WORK
The tools change. My commitment to learning doesn’t.
01
People before tools.
Technology matters because it changes what people can notice, practice, communicate, or create. People first, content second, technology third.
02
Build and study.
I am most interested in questions I can approach from both sides: designing an environment and then investigating what happens inside it.
03
Evidence over novelty.
Emerging technology is interesting. Evidence about when, why, for whom, and under what conditions it helps learning is more useful.
OUTSIDE of WORK
There should be a life outside the browser tabs.
When I am not working, I gravitate toward making things, reading, exercising, and spending time with my family. I have also learned that I apparently enjoy very long walks with unnecessary elevation: I have finished a marathon and climbed Kilimanjaro.
CREATIVE PRACTICE
Drawing · painting · photography
physical ENDURANCE
Marathon finisher · Kilimanjaro
FROM THE SKETCHBOOK
Making things is another way I think.
A few pieces from different periods and media.
Alex Barrett 