Ricki Goldman

Ricki Goldman is a digital video ethnographer, learning and media theorist, and inventor of tools for video analysis: at the MIT Media Lab—Learning Constellations™ (circa 1988); in the MERLin Lab at the University of British Columbia—Constellations™ (1993), Global Forest ™ (1995), and Web Constellations™ (1998); and, in NYU's CREATE Lab—Orion-beta™. Goldman investigates inner-city girls' social and emotional learning in the context of a games-for-learning curriculum. In Kwah & Goldman (2011) she and her doctoral student, Helen Kwah, report on embodied interactions of teacher/learner gestures in a robotics classroom.

Her first book, Points of Viewing Children’s Thinking: A Digital Ethnographer’s Journey (LEA, 1998) was accompanied by a pioneering digital video research website with interactive video cases and tools for commentary. For over twenty-five years of conducting research in STEM classrooms, Ricki has developed a theory of mind and learning as well a framework for conducting research. The Points of Viewing Theory (POV-T) and the Perspectivity Framework, respectively, describe how we layer our diverse viewpoints to find patterns through complex data. Her research has been awarded with generous grants from government agencies including the Canadian's Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), Canada Foundation Innovation (CFI), and the US National Science Foundation (NSF).

For inspiration and fun, Ricki hikes, dances, cycles, paints, and practices yoga.