Gerry Stahl

Gerry Stahl
Gerry Stahl keynote at ICCE 2009 in Hong Kong
Born	March 16, 1945 (1945-03-16) (age 72) Wilmington, DE, USA
Website	gerrystahl.net

Gerry Stahl (born March 16, 1945) is emeritus professor of computing and informatics at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA, USA. He is a researcher in the field of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) and the Learning Sciences. He has taught, designed, analyzed and theorized about learning with technology in small groups. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. He directed the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) research project at the Math Forum from 2003-2014 and published four books and many articles analyzing project data. From these findings, he developed the postcognitivist theory of group cognition.

Gerry Stahl was born in Wilmington, DE on March 16, 1945. He grew up outside of Philadelphia, in the town of Trevose, Bensalem township, Pennsylvania, USA.

He lives with his wife, Carol Bliss, in Chatham, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. He has two sons, Zake and Rusty. Zake is married to KimLou and they have a daughter, Nastasja. Rusty is married to Sarah and they have a daughter, Ruby.

Stahl studied philosophy and mathematics at MIT (1963-1967), where he also took courses from Marvin Minsky, Samuel Todes, Hubert Dreyfus and Noam Chomsky, and became active in the New Left. He studied continental philosophy and social theory at Heidelberg, Northwestern and Frankfurt Universities (1968-1973), writing a dissertation on Marx and Heidegger. Later, he studied computer science and cognitive science at the University of Colorado (1989-1993), developing the Hermes system for design rationale and writing a dissertation on tacit knowledge.

Stahl worked during the 1970s as a computer programmer and systems analyst at Temple University and Northwestern University on the CDC 6400, the largest mainframe computer operating system of its day. He was active in organizing the AFSCME union at Temple University's computer center. Later, he was a community organizer in the neighborhoods of Philadelphia and then neighborhood planner at the Southwest Germantown Community Development Corporation, raising many grants for the neighborhood credit union, energy conservation agency, youth jobs program, commercial development and housing rehab. After conducting research for the Center for the Study of Civic Values, he founded and ran the Community Computerization Project to help non-profit organizations computerize when personal computers became available in the 1980s.