Marty Siegel

Assuming that an interactive artifact cannot be fully understood by itself due to their increasing number, we explored how individual artifacts are related to each other and how those relationships can be investigated for further design and research implications. This study suggests a concept of ecology of artifacts to describe any implicit or explicit relationships among interactive artifacts in one's personal life. We conducted two types of studies--personal inventory study and an ecology map study--to explore multiple dimensions for understanding a personal ecology of artifacts. We expect the knowledge of artifact ecology would help designers and researchers in the field of HCI to create and analyze interactive artifacts considering their dynamic interplays in an increasingly ubiquitous technology environment.

Tested the effectiveness of a direct-instruction approach used with the corrective feedback paradigm (CFP) in a drill and practice program that included adaptive feedback techniques with discrimination training and increasing ratio review. 102 undergraduates were randomly assigned to 1 of 6 drill-treatment groups. Each group varied the type of review and corrective feedback: Group 1 (increasing ratio review and adaptive feedback with training); Group 2 (immediate review only and adaptive feedback with training); Group 3 (increasing ratio review and adaptive feedback); Group 4 (immediate review only and adaptive feedback); Group 5 (no review and adaptive feedback), and Group 6 (increasing ratio review and fixed feedback). The task consisted of learning 20 English–Japanese (transliterated) word pairs. Planned orthogonal comparisons demonstrated the statistical superiority on posttest performance of …

A system and method for case study instruction, comprising a host server, a database associated with the host server, at least one client computer, and a network operably connecting the host server and the client computer (s). Client computers are operated by learners or facilitators. Case studies according to the present invention comprise episodes. Each episode comprises events on timelines, character profiles, and, optionally, resources. Each event optionally comprises activities. Information about a case study is retrievably stored on the host server and in the database. Case studies are executed by one or more learners using a client computer to retrieve case study information through the network. Learners may be organized into teams. Where the network comprises a global computer network, learners may execute a case study from substantially any place in the world, at substantially any time of the day …

If James Burke were writing today his award-winning television series, The Day the Universe Changed, he surely would choose a time in November 1993, when such an event occurred. A student team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released the first version of a graphical user interface to the World Wide Web, taking advantage of new Internet protocols developed at the CERN physics laboratory in Switzerland. No longer would the vision of the" information superhighway" be limited to 500 on-demand TV channels, gopher sites, and file transfer protocols. NCSA's Mosaic browser was followed by the commercial Netscape Navigator, revealing the power of integrated usercentered design. A multi-billion dollar industry was launched. We now think of Internet information as the Web—interactive multimedia hypertext sites with dizzying graphics, digital sounds, and snappy animations. Its primary tool, the browser, shapes our thinking about the organization, presentation, and quality of information:• information is not static; it is ever-changing and expanding;• information is linked and" instantaneously" accessed;• information is organized in multiple ways;• information is produced by anonymous authors; it does not rely on established editorial or publishing practices; and• information is screen-based; it is seen through a scrolling window and divided into" screen chunks."

There has been an ongoing conversation about the role and relationship of theory and practice in the HCI community. This paper explores this relationship privileging a practice perspective through a tentative model, which describes a" bubble-up" of ideas from practice to inform research and theory development, and an accompanying" trickle-down" of theory into practice. Interviews were conducted with interaction designers, which included a description of their use of design methods in practice, and their knowledge and use of two common design methods-affinity diagramming and the concept of affordance. Based on these interviews, potential relationships between theory and practice are explored through this model. Disseminating agents already common in HCI practice are addressed as possible mechanisms for the research community to understand practice more completely. Opportunities for future research …

This book has a simple purpose. We think of our audience as educators—teachers, prospective teachers, and teacher trainers—who know little or nothing about computers and computer-based education (CBE), are uncomfortable with the technical aspects of educational computing, but feel that the field is rapidly becoming so important that they need to find out something about it. This book supplies the information you need. When you find out what that is, you may be surprised—pleasantly, we hope. You will not find any discussion of bits and bytes, of RAM and ROM, or CP/M, I/O ports, or S-100 buses here. This book is not" everything you always wanted to know about computers." In fact, it is not about computers at all. It is about the use of computers in education by nonspecialists. It does not take the lid off your Apple and provide a guided tour of its electronic components. Instead, it talks about how patterns of computer use in our culture are changing and orients the educational user within the new culture.It does not talk about binary arithmetic, Boolean logic, or the ASCII character codes. Instead, it talks about the ways computers are used in education and compares the various uses from the teacher's point of view. In short, this book concentrates on people—not on machines. It represents the distillation of twelve years' experience working with computer nonspecialists in CBE in a wide variety of capacities. With our colleagues at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois, we have developed over 500 hours of computer-based instructional lessons. That experience has given us a good feel for educational …

As early as 1657, when Moravian educator John Amos Comenius published Orbis Sensualium Pictus, an illustrated children's text for teaching Latin, the textbook has been the central tool used in the classroom. And its form today is very much the same as it was then—a stack of paper bound between two covers, linearly arranged, with some organized method of access such as a table of contents or index. From the early grades through graduate school, the textbook dictates the curriculum's content, guides the teacher's instructional plans, and molds the student's conceptual understanding.

This paper describes evaluating interactive entertainment by understanding embodied learning in games, which is a perspective that situates the learning that a player must go through to play a game in a skill-based environment. Our goal was to arrive at a tool for designers to improve learnability from this perspective. To study embodied learning, we use the concept of breakdown, which happens when our experience fails to aid our everyday actions and decision-making. We conducted a study to investigate learning in games from which we constructed a framework of 17 patterns of breakdown and a set of guidelines to aid heuristic evaluation of video games and to help designers support breakdown in interactions, which support players’ learning, so that they do not become breakdowns in illusion, which break players’ immersion [19].

In this paper we make the case that there is today a growing number of educational settings experiencing challenges when it comes to transforming non-designers into designers, and in particular, interaction designers. We see this development as a consequence of an increased awareness and recognition of what broadly could be labeled as a design perspective. We examine the transformational process, the metamorphosis, by which non-designer students become interaction designers. We identify and describe the barriers that make it difficult for the students to move through this transformational process. We also propose some pedagogical approaches that can reduce the barriers and improve the possibility for the transformation to occur. The approach that we have developed and describe consists of three parts. Based on a fundamental understanding of the nature of design, we have developed (i) a tentative transformational model of how non-designers become interaction designers;(ii) a special kind of conceptual framework used to support students in the transformational process; and (iii) design assignments based on real-world design problems. We end the paper with two conclusions. First we argue that there is a challenge in transforming non-designers into designers, but that it is possible if the educational effort is based on an understanding of design and on the transformational process with its barriers. Finally we argue that the experience of trying to turn non-designers into interaction designers is in itself a valuable research approach. Dealing with non-designer students reveals deep insights about the nature of the design process …

Design Pedagogy explains why it is vital that design students education helps them construct a ‘passport’to enter the professional sphere. This collection explores how design education is, in itself, a passport to practice and showcase how some of the key developments in education use techniques related to collaboration, case studies and experience to motivate students, enable them to express their identity, reflect and learn.

As we begin the New Year, gyms around the globe will enjoy a predictable spike in membership. For days—perhaps even a few short weeks—rows of treadmills will be clogged with neophyte runners adamant in their belief that this year is the year for change. This year I will transform myself. I will lose the weight and keep it off. I’ll stick to my diet and exercise regimen. This year I’ll... and then slowly but surely their commitment starts wavering. They get home from the office and they’d rather kick back on the couch than run. They’d rather order a burger than a salad.

We describe a notion of designs as “ex-plan-ations,” specifically plans or explanations about why some things—artifacts, features of artifacts, interactions between people and artifacts, or interactions between whole ecologies of people and artifacts, futures and collective futures—are a certain way or why they should be another way. We describe how we have operationalized the notion of design as explanations in terms of a particular framework that we call the PRInCiPleS framework. Finally, we explain how the notion of design explanations and the PRInCiPleS framework is tightly integrated into our structuring of a curriculum in HCI and design (HCI/d) at the School of Informatics, Indiana University at Bloomington.

A formative evaluation of the instructional effectiveness of twenty hours of computer-based reading comprehension instruction for adults was conducted. The lessons taught reading comprehension subskills called 'information finding' and 'paraphrasing.' Thirty-six adults studied either the reading lessons or computer-based mathematics lessons for the same length of time, about two months. The group that studied reading lessons improved significantly in pre to posttest performance relative to mathematics students. The increased test performance was retained on another posttest given a month later. The study supports the value of a complete computer-based reading comprehension curriculum following similar instructional strategies.

ConclusionWe also discuss how these personal networks–namely, device landscapes–present new challenges and implications to the interaction design and HCI research community by comparing it to the perspectives of ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments.

While synchronous and asynchronous applications such as chat and email effectively foster casual communication, such applications are less successful in facilitating deep, insightful conversation. This is a particular challenge when asynchronous threaded discussion forums are used in e-learning settings. This paper examines the implementation of discussion forums in the context of WisdomTools Scenarios/spl trade/, an e-learning tool which exploits case-based narrative to provide authentic contexts for asynchronous, collaborative persistent conversations. An analysis of usage from two independent scenarios, one used in an academic context and the other in a corporate context, shows that embedding forums within narrative scenes encouraged learner involvement and focused conversation. At the same time, we identify directions for improving the interaction design of these forums, including the ability for …