Dr. Elisabeth Sylvan joins the Olin community as Visiting Associate Professor of Sociotechnical Systems. Learn more about Elisabeth and her experience in this Q&A.
Meet Dr. Elisabeth Sylvan, Visiting Associate Professor of Sociotechnical Systems.
Can you share a bit about your background and how you came to be at Olin?
For many years, I’ve kept an eye on Olin because I have long appreciated the institution’s hands-on, project-based, and student-driven approach to education. After a colleague sent me the call for faculty at Olin, I saw that the search committee offered an open house in the virtual 2D world, Gather Town. When I attended the event, I loved what I heard from the faculty and immediately applied.
My life’s work is to enable people to create, share and effect change through sociotechnical systems. This passion has steered me towards a range of organizational settings, including academia, industry, museums, and civic nonprofits. Over the last year, I've taught design engineering, the ethics and use of generative AI, AI’s impact on critical thinking, and technology entrepreneurship at the School of Engineering at Brown University, the Department of Architecture and Design at Rhode Island School of Design, and School of Politics and Public Policy at the Technical University of Munich. From 2019-2024, I served in executive leadership at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University (BKC), where I worked on technology ethics policy and practices across the globe. Before that, I was the Vice President of Education at The Tech Interactive in Silicon Valley, Maker in Residence at the Krause Center for Innovation at Foothill College, Fellow and Director of Learning and Community at an open science collaborative called Manylabs, and a Researcher Scientist and Project Director at the education R&D nonprofit, TERC. My master's and PhD are from the MIT Media Lab.
My hope is that the experiences and knowledge I offer can enrich the fine engineering education offered at Olin. I believe that young engineers should be offered conceptual and hands-on approaches to the critical and ethical design and development of systems. That’s one way I can potentially contribute.
What inspired you to become an educator, and what impact do you hope to have on your students?
All the women who came before me in my family were educators. Teaching and learning were rarely explicitly discussed but I was brought up to be conscious of how experiences are presented to engage any audience, including learners. That awareness is part of me, always.
At first, I avoided becoming an educator because I was interested in other topics: technology, writing, identity, and sociotechnical systems. If I’m honest with myself, I probably avoided it due to internalized misogyny too. I think my interests in both design and learning technologies grew out of my desire to make things that are elegant and useful, along with my family experiences.
Now I love teaching, and my practice of study is not separate from my teaching practice. For me, developing enriching learning experiences, understanding sociotechnical systems, and designing tools for learning are all cut from the same cloth.
My hope is that I can support students to see themselves as capable of action, growth, and learning, throughout their lives. I hope to help them to see how the larger social systems impact what gets built. I’d like students to have the courage and knowledge to question and change those systems so that they can design and build a future that is better than today.
Describe your work with emerging technologies and any other research you are currently involved in.
My current work addresses how AI impacts people’s thinking processes and how emerging technologies can be designed for human cognition and flourishing.
Thinking is situated within the environment in which we exist: the social space, the physical space, the digital space, and the tools we used to create. When we write, draw, and create other media, the activity helps us to organize and express our thoughts. Research is beginning to demonstrate the negative impacts of generative AI tools on human thinking, and it seems that the tools impact not only learners and novices, but also experts who have developed established practices in their work. My research focuses on both these novice and expert areas. With colleagues and based on previous research, I am developing a study of teachers and students about AI tools’ impact on K12 students. From there, we plan to develop design guidelines for technologists and policymakers. The second project, still in its early stages, is an analysis of how well generative AI tools’ responses support human’s critical and creative thinking, as opposed to simply providing whole answers to human requests.
In parallel with these efforts, I hope to work with colleagues to create a tool that will systematically collect data about different generative AI tools’ responses in different contexts. Much of the data needed to understand networked technologies, such as generative AI tools, are privately held in walled gardens that are difficult or impossible for researchers to access. To conduct research on generative AI and envision positive futures with it, we need platforms that document its outputs. Ultimately, the goal of this project is to host an openly available data archive that documents the technology’s rapidly changing capacities over time and provides an infrastructural resource for global research that can inform the design of both technology and policy. This work and others are enabled by my long-term work with the Global Network of Internet & Society Research Centers (NoC), an international assembly of academic centers collaborating on the ethical and social issues of technology.
Another K12 education project I am working on is about the US edtech ecosystem and the dynamics among its stakeholders. The US edtech ecosystems’ stakeholders, including private high-tech and edtech companies, local, state, and national government, school systems and their employees, and families, have misaligned motivators, power differentials, and a lack of incentives to align better. Based on a study my colleagues and I conducted with edtech stakeholders, I’ve written about how this ecosystem is a failure of what could have been a “knowledge commons” -- a collectively owned and managed information space—and how it still could be designed to succeed.
Do you have a favorite moment in your career you can share?
It’s hard to pick a single favorite moment. Out of all my projects at BKC, the most personally meaningful program that I led was the Research Sprint, which invited students from across the globe to meet online to address specific concerns regarding the ethics of digitalization. Students were put in active dialogue with established thought leaders, deepening their understanding of digital challenges and alternatives, and culminating in outputs with real world impact including policy briefs, best practices recommendations, open educational resources, and technology oversight recommendations. As I get to know Olin, I’m thinking about how to transform the Research Sprint approaches and topics for learning opportunities we offer to Olin students.
What classes will you teach at Olin?
Currently I am co-teaching “Quantitative Engineering Analysis 1,” focusing on the course’s ethics concerns with facial recognition. I’m also teaching “Designing with Emerging Technologies: Generative AI,” an elective that is offered as either an AHS or engineering credit that counts towards a design concentration. In this class, the students and I are trying out different AI tools and thinking about how they can use them in our workflows as student and, later, in the workforce. At the same time, much of our work together focuses on how fraught this technology and its use are, the challenges it presents to us —both societally and individually, and how we—as individuals —will choose how and when we adopt it in various contexts.
Next semester, I might contribute to “Collaborative Design.” I’m wondering whether it might make sense to teach the generative AI class again because the current class was opened to students in August because that’s when I joined Olin. I'm also considering a class in which students create engineering and science museum exhibits. In this course, potentially called “Designing for Public Understanding,” students would identify real world engineering and science concerns that they explain to the public. Previously, I’ve run similar educational programs with Boston’s Museum of Science.
What do you like to do for fun and/or in your free time outside of Olin?
I’ve been rock climbing for about a year now and I absolutely love it. It makes me feel free and confident and I get to do it with my teenager, which is a treat. For years, I’ve done yoga, an important touchpoint in my life.
When I can be, I’m outside. I hike, ski, and swim.
I’m a lifelong gardener. I started as a kid with my dad. I like to grow food and think about how landscapes can remain beautiful and textured throughout seasons. I don’t mess with houseplants because they are too needy.
I go to a lot of live music. Some shows I went to this year are The Flaming Lips, Khruangbin, Allison Russell, AJR, Mother Mother, Nickel Creek, Steve Earle, and Robert Glasper.
My two cats, Springer and Cruz, add joy and spice to our family. I am an animal person and a cat person.
Oliners can ask me about…?
Oliners can ask me about anything I’ve mentioned here. If they are interested in research and reading group opportunities about the topics I’ve mentioned, we can talk about that!
As Oliners think about what they want to do in their professional lives, I’m also happy to talk about what I’ve learned through various work contexts in different categories of roles.
I’m always happy to talk cooking, books, music, yoga, scuba diving, and local stuff to do. In an alternative world, I was a travel planner.
You can ask me about anything, really. I’m pretty open.
Oliners can teach me about…?
To start, Oliners can teach me about Olin! Tell me about our approach to learning because I’m perennially passionate about learning systems. I’m also curious whether Oliners have interest in particular subjects I could teach, which will help me know which courses to propose. Also, please help me understand our abbreviations!
I’m excited to be at an engineering school again. Oliners can teach me about new developments in engineering and what excites them about what they are learning. I’m interested in how students are using AI and if they have developed any AR/VR/XR technologies. Oliners can ask me about a nascent project that helps people to understand bias in technologies, even if people don’t experience particular kinds of biases themselves.
Oliners can share book recommendations. I’m always reading, both non-fiction and fiction, including speculative and science fiction, magical realism, or anything that people tell me is excellent. I love a good thriller.
I hear there’s a mushroom foraging community here at Olin? I’d love to learn more about that. And the other surprising affinity groups and activities I’m sure we have.