Ashlyn Sparrow, Shauna Chung to Keynote 2022 Symposium for Teaching with Technology

The UChicago Symposium for Teaching with Technology is pleased to announce that the 2022 Symposium will feature two keynote speakers. Ashlyn Sparrow will provide the keynote for April 20, and Shauna Chung for April 21.

Ashlyn Sparrow

Ashlyn Sparrow is an independent game designer. Her work focuses on creating socially impactful games and health focused app interventions. In 2013, Ashlyn was the Learning Technology Director of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab at the University of Chicago, devoted to creating game-based health interventions supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. During her tenure she designed and led the production of The Source, S.E.E.D, Hexacago Health Academy, Bystander, and Prognosis. In 2018, she became the Assistant Director of the Weston Game Lab (WGL) at the Media Arts, Data, and Design (MADD) Center at the University of Chicago where she teaches undergraduate, graduate and K-12 students how to design their own games while uncovering the sociopolitical implications of their designs. Through WGL, she has developed a series of alternate reality games including Indiecade award-winning game Terrarium, A Labyrinth, and Echo. In addition to her work at WGL, she works as a game designer and programmer in Chicago, having worked on Oni Fighter Yasuke for Waking Oni Games.  

Shauna Chung

Shauna Chung recently received her Ph.D. in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design from Clemson University. With a vested scholarly interest in and passion for digital fluency, she has worked with leaders in higher education and learning technologists to develop media assets, learning modules, and hands-on workshops for university faculty and both undergraduate and graduate students across disciplines. Her experiences as a first-year and advanced composition teacher at Clemson, along with roles as an Adobe Digital Literacy Thought Leader and Adobe Master Teacher, have also provided her with opportunities to push and rethink the boundaries of traditional writing genres and involve learners as active participants in the creation and dissemination of meaning through video, podcast, and webtext production. Her scholarship examines similar themes but through the lens of worldview and social media. More specifically, she investigates how participatory media open and close moments of deliberative discourse between interlocutors with diverse and conflicting beliefs. Through this study, she explores ways that users of digital technologies, especially students, can leverage their technical affordances to speak across difference with more empathy and critical understanding. Her work appears in Textshop Experiments and The Writing Instructor, where she writes about multimodal composition and pedagogical approaches for the digital age. Outside of teaching and research, she tinkers with creative projects in visual and sonic media and enjoys getting lost in the minutiae of film scoring and editing. Visit Shauna Chung’s portfolio