Loren Olson
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Phone: 480-965-9839
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Stauffer B260 TEMPE, AZ 85287-8709
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Mail code: 5802Campus: Tempe
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Loren Olson is a clinical associate professor at the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. His research work is in the areas of mixed reality rehabilitation, interaction architecture, and media systems for education. Prior to joining the School of Arts, Media and Engineering, he spent 16 years creating animation and effects for film and television. His awards include eight Rocky Mountain Emmy Awards.
Recently, a focus of his work has been the creation of a tool for peer review in the classroom with David Tinapple. CritViz is an online framework for supporting real-time critique, conversation, and peer ranking of creative work in the classroom. In creative classes where student work cannot be entirely graded on objective criteria, classes often arrange critique sessions to provide direction and feedback to students, raise their level of performance, and teach them to give and receive constructive criticism. Critiques usually work best in classes small enough to sustain a single discussion. However, faced with the challenge of teaching large undergraduate digital art and computer programming classes of 50+ students, a solution was needed to allow faculty to orchestrate critiques in large classes whose size normally prohibits them. While leveraging the participatory web seemed to be a sound approach, no existing tools effectively served this purpose. Accordingly, CritViz was created to scale up critiques for large classes. Through CritViz’s countdown timers, assignment uploading, and randomized peer feedback, we can now run effective critiques in much larger classes and have seen changes in overall classroom “motivational structure.”
Loren Olson co-directs the Digital Culture Summer Institute. DCSI is a 3-week summer day program for junior high and high school students. The program engages young students with a variety of creative digital projects that captivate students artistic and technical sides via a series of short project-focused modules such as digital music production, computational photography, electronic musical instrument construction, game design and making, digital fabrication, and projection mapping. Core to our educational mission is the idea that key 21st century STEM skills such as computational thinking, problem solving, creative coding, collaboration, innovation, and information literacy can be taught in a highly effective manner by using creative challenges as an intrinsic motivator. By engaging students in creative digital arts projects they are naturally driven to acquire many new complex skills that they might otherwise consider unapproachable.
B.S. Computer Science, Arizona State University 1988
