Background
Amy S. Bruckman was born in New York, New New York
Amy S. Bruckman was born in New York, New New York
She attended the Horace Mann School, an Ivy Preparatory School in New York City, graduating in 1983. Following that, Bruckman attended Harvard University for her undergraduate studies, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics in 1987. Bruckman went on to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy at the Media Laboratory in Mitchel Resnick"s Epistemology and Learning Group.
She is best known for her pioneering research in the fields of online communities and the learning sciences. In 1999, she was selected as one of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Technology Review"s TR100 award, honoring 100 remarkable innovators under the age of 35. She received a master"s degree in 1991 from the Interactive Cinema Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, where she was advised by Glorianna Davenport.
Her master"s thesis described the Electronic Scrapbook, an intelligent home video editing system.
On January 20, 1993, Bruckman established MediaMOO, an online community for new media researchers and educators. The community, managed chiefly by Bruckman, developed a significant following for its time, eventually closing down seven years later.
During this time, Bruckman also worked as a research assistant for Sherry Turkle on Turkle"s influential book, Life on the Screen (1997). Foreign her dissertation work, Bruckman developed MOOSE Crossing, a MOO-based constructionist learning environment in which young children could learn computer programming skills while building virtual objects.
Upon her graduation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997, Bruckman accepted a position as an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing.
As a new faculty member, Bruckman founded the Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) Laboratory and began setting up a program of research incorporating her interests in online communities and constructionist learning. She founded the Undergraduate Research Opportunities in Computing (UROC) program at in 1998, modeling it after Massachusetts Institute of Technology"s UROP. In 1999, Bruckman"s research was supported by a prestigious grant awarded by the National Science Foundation"s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program That same year, she was selected as one of Technology Review"s 100 remarkable innovators under the age of 35.
Her work at this time was described as "the most notable MOO research in education."
On July 22, 1999, Bruckman and graduate student Joshua Berman released The Turing Game, a multiplayer online game inspired by the Turing test that challenged players to explore issues of online identity.
The game received national attention and was played by over 11,000 people from 81 countries and all seven continents. In 2002, the American Educational Research Association presented Bruckman with the January Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies.
A year later, Bruckman received tenure and was promoted to the position of associate professor In 2012, she was made a full professor
Bruckman currently directs the ELC Laboratory, the UROC program, and the Web Science initiative at She has published dozens of scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals and has given invited presentations at high-profile academic conferences such as ICLS and Centre Hospitalier Intercommunal. Bruckman"s most recent work, often done in conjunction with graduate students she advises, has dealt with topics in information ethics, game studies, computer-supported collaboration and wikis, and women in computing.