Eric Hamilton

Professional Title
Professor and Associate Dean
Organization/Institution
About Me (Bio)
Eric Hamilton is Professor and Associate Dean of Education at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles. The Education Division currently serves approximately 750 graduate students in the areas of teacher and administrator preparation at the K12 level, learning technologies, and organizational leadership and development.

Dr. Hamilton also holds a joint appointment in mathematics. He carries out research activities under support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Education’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), studying means to enhance the creativity and media fluencies of mathematics teachers, intergenerational communication in mathematics between teachers and students, and the use of artificial agents and language parsers in collaborative educational workspaces. Much of this work is highlighted at the web site http://teacherscreate.org.

Hamilton works extensively with educational and research partners overseas, particularly in east Africa. He has also led the NSF-funded Distributed Learning and Collaboration (DLAC) symposium series in Shanghai, Singapore, Uganda and Germany. Dr. Hamilton came to Pepperdine from the US Air Force Academy, where he was a research professor and director of the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning. Dr. Hamilton has given numerous invited and keynote addresses in the areas of learning technologies and future learning environments at conferences in the US and overseas.

Prior to his assignment at the Air Force Academy, he was a member of the US government’s senior executive service corps as the director for the education and learning technology research division at NSF. Originally tenured in computer science, he came to NSF from Loyola University Chicago, where he organized and led a large consortium on STEM learning, invented and secured patents on pen-based computing collaboration, and directed the Chicago Systemic Initiative in mathematics and science education. Hamilton earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Northwestern University.
Pepperdine University
08/15/2011

This project engages high-school students as student-tutors who create screen-capture videos that demonstrate step-by-step solutions to mathematical problems and explicate the use of interactive applets. The project tests whether the mathematical and communication skills of student-tutors improve in the process of making the video materials. It also tests whether teachers and student users benefit from the videos. The project will examine whether the process of creating and disseminating the videos is replicable and scalable.