Terrie Lynn Thompson, a doctoral student in the Department of Educational Policy Studies, won an Andrew Stewart Memorial Graduate Prize (University of Alberta) and a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, Doctoral (SSHRC).
Co-supervised by Dr Janice Wallace and Dr Margaret Haughey, Terrie Lynn’s research on how workers use online communities has led her to consulting work in China and further research in the United Kingdom.Her research focuses on how self-employed workers experience informal work-learning in online communities.This work has implications for how organizations structure online courses and other learning opportunities, both for their own and contract employees:
"I've taken a critical look at how alliances between people and technologies emerge in these online cyberspaces and the impact of these 'networks' of people and objects on learning and work lives. My research raises questions about how well people (here in Canada and globally) are able to leverage the learning opportunities potentially available through the power of the Internet."