From K-12 to graduate school education, innovations in technology in recent years have been transforming classrooms and other learning spaces at a swift pace. Dr. Shaundra B. Daily is an educational technologist whose interdisciplinary training enables her to blend cutting-edge science and engineering with sophisticated pedagogical ideas to design learning technologies.
An assistant professor in the Human-Centered Computing Division in the School of Computing at Clemson University, Daily is in her second year as a faculty member, where she balances an ambitious research portfolio with her teaching. The division is chaired by Dr. Juan Gilbert, an award-winning scholar who is credited with mentoring more African-Americans through computer science Ph.D. programs than anyone.
“Her research [is] just a great fit” for the division, Gilbert says.
A graduate of the celebrated Media Laboratory Ph.D. program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Daily honed her skills and understanding of educational technology in a program that’s known for its emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches to research and technology development. “The Media Lab has a long history of designing technologies for teaching and learning,” she says.
For Daily, the road to MIT and Clemson only began to take a clear path once she started thinking about the possibility of becoming a professor during her undergraduate years at Florida State University. As a teenager who attended high school in Birmingham, Ala., Daily had not thought of herself as a “techie.”
“I was a dancer, gymnast and cheerleader who happened to be good in math and science,” she says.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Florida State University, the idea of combining teaching and technology took hold. Daily earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Florida A&M University and went on to MIT.
