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April 26, 2006
Making a Difference: Integrating Socially Relevant Projects into HCI Teaching
11:30 - 13:00, 517c
There once was panel at CHI
That asked the deep question of WHY
Do some have yearning
To do service learning?
The benefits are hard to deny.
When students help the community
It leads to peace and unity
Students do more
Than just get a score
It’s a real education opportunity
Nass, Jones, then Bishop, and Friedman
Marsden, Lazar, and Shneiderman
After coffee and tea
Come to 517—C
Be sure it’s a part of your plan!
After this delightful ditty from the panelists, it might be easy to dismiss social motivation in HCI teaching as flower-power motivated feel-good scholarship. That would be to underestimate the power of socially relevant project work, as the participants in this panel testified. Ben Shneiderman, Jonathan Lazar, Batya Friedman w/ Janet Davis, Ann Bishop, Gary Marsden, and Erica Robles (in place of Cliff Nass) described various approaches to how they have used socially relevant projects to both make important social contributions and to improve learning around HCI. Why would one want to adopt this model of teaching? One of the most important reasons is that socially relevant project work is situated and participatory, which makes it much closer to real world situations, with much the same sorts of conflicts, disappointments, relationships and constraints that people face when they work in the industry. This brings together their skills and models of understanding and puts it into practice - with immediate and often clearly measurable effects. This brings out the issue of value sensitivity: making it clear that artifacts have politics and that designers have perspectives, and the designs they create will reflect that.
However, this is not easily or frivolously accomplished. Batya Friedman of the University of Washington's Information School talked about their work on value sensitive design, and student trajectories through the Information School that were supported by that perspective. Students in the graduate program carry out a capstone project with student defined information problems and methods of investigation that tie together the strands of human centred and technical design, in order to make a positive difference to some set of people. Planning for this project starts up to a year before, with conceptual, technical and empirical mini-investigations. Her student, Janet Davis, presented an example of what a socially relevant project might look like in the end, in this case her dissertation work on urban indicators for public policy planners and householders. Of course, not every project needs to be of that length and complexity: Ann Bishop of the University of Illinois, and Jonathan Lazar of CIS/Towson University talked about their (very successful) experiences doing short term interventions in and around their university areas their students.
It may seem like these efforts, though excellent venues for education, do not necessarily generate new knowledge. Erica Robles discussed how studies of language and communication in technologically mediated systems provided the basis for grounding project work in socio-technical perspectives while at the same time helping further critical theory in the field. For those who argue that this kind of knowledge does not necessarily result in implications for design, Gary Marsden from the University of Cape Town, South Africa brought forth the somewhat startling report that for their work, protoyping based design processes simply did not work, and that contextual inquiry and ethnographic, participatory design was crucial to the success of these kinds of efforts. Unfortunately, the academic community at large does not seem to appreciate the merit of these projects, and most panelists agreed that it was harder to publish papers on these projects than others; the story of two CHI reviewers who rejected a recent paper on the grounds that projects about illiteracy are irrelevant because "most users can read" is extremely disheartening. Hopefully the situation will change.
Discussants:
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Ben Shneiderman
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Jonathan Lazar
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Ann Bishop
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Gary Marsden
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Batya Friedman
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Erica Robles
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Notes
- Poem by panel
- Shneiderman
- Chi committee no longer has an education chair
- Ambitious tea projects to benefit someone outside the classroom
- Help the community
- Strengthen education
- Promote visibility of HCI
- Assert value in helping others
- Provide experiences in service learning
- Guidelines in doing it right
- Find projects
- Assemble teams
- Require multiple milestones
- Cope with team problems
- Do peer reviews of drafts
- Conduct class presentations
- Put up web page to preserve results
- Grade for whole team, credits page
Batya Friedman
- Informatics capstone experience
- Goals
- Student defined information problem
- Student-defined methods of investigation
- Synthesis of human-centered and technical strands
- Make a difference
- Timeline: start year before, present proposal, conduct
- Examples
- Local political information recommender
- Virtual jaamati: enabling and facilitating the exchange of ideas within places of community
- Informed consent for online communities
- Value sensitive design
- Theory and method
- Quarter long project of the student's choice
- Three mini investigation
- Conceptual, empirical, or technical
- Janet Davis (PhD student)
- Value sensitive design research lab
- Knew about HCI, but never engaged. Did study on internet, but there were no people in it
- Household indicators: value sensitive design to inform and engage citizens
- Helps citizens and policy makers see the effects of their policy decisions; explicitly supports values of democracy, accountability
- Undergrads find this sort of work accessible, and are excited and try to engage themselves
Ann Peterson Bishop
- Students work with teen tech crew members from east St. Louis to refurbish 46 donated computers
- Computers distributed to individuals
- Teens start small tech help business in storefront
- Over 40 computers set up
- Community informatics corps
- Students combine classroom activities and 80 hours practical engagement with non-profit organizations
- Create website for local refugee center
- Establish Korean community center
- Start afterschool program for Hispanic immigrants
- Social entrepreneurship
- Books to prisoners
- Community inquiry: knowledge is both understanding and action… collective, democratic
- Community informatics Day and Schuler
- Building collaboration and trust with marginalized communities
Jonathan Lazar
- Towson Univ
- Why is service learning better education?
- Students learn more about societal issues
- Student projects should not sit on the shelf gathering dust, they should be used
- Community group are in need of help with their IT needs
- MORE EFFECTIVE!
- Why better?
- Students experience with real users (new experience for undergrads)
- Students immediately get to apply theory into practice
- Studies show that students are more engaged in the material, better mastery of material
- Students can develop a portfolio of projects that may help in getting a job
- Cheating is less of a problem
- Better tool for course assessment
- Students get to experience the trade offs and limitations in the real world
Gary Marsden
- From a developing country
- Social issues not optional
- Instituted in grant evaluation
- Culture of transformation
- Reviewers said: There are no illiterate users in the world?
- What are bridge people?
- Prototyping does not work
- Contextual inquiry, critical action research, ethnography are way to go
- Has a new column on hci in the developing world in interactions
Erica Robles
- Kozmetsky global collaboratory
Matt Jones
- Who is my neighbour?
- Even watching one life cam be humbling
- HCI "noble face" of CS
- Changes in HCI: more and more about relationships, play, empathy
- Changes us
- Students are not cynics: that's an excuse for educators not to do anything about this
- Educators are already overstretched
- Support structures
- Network
- Think about sustainability
- Be inspired: alumni, memory walls, websites, interactions magazine
- Orality and literacy - wider definitions
- Ethical issues: do not exploit the user
- Sustainability
- Promote continuity (across student populations)
- Disasters can also be sustainable
- Student organizations to create long lasting engagement
- How to start this culture of sociality
- Starting early, and having long term projects
- Starting small, and using that project as a demonstration
Posted by sv3 at April 26, 2006 09:32 AM