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Research News
Primary Interests:
HCI, User-Interface Design, Electronic notetaking, Studio Approach to
Design
During the fall of 2007, I began work on a new three-year NSF
Collaborative
Research Award (No.
IIS-0725145) entitled Investigating
and Refining the Studio Experience as a Method for Teaching Human-Computer
Interaction. This award is a collaborative effort between myself and
researchers at Virginia Tech and the
University of Oregon.
Our research focus is to discover how the Studio approach to
design, which is commonly used in Schools of Architecture and
Industrial Design, can be applied to teaching User Interface design within
Computer Science departments. I recently returned from the
24th
National Conference on the Beginning Design Student
, where I presented--together with Margarita McGrath from Virginia
Tech--a talk entitled: (de)Coding the Studio Method to Teach the Design
of
Human-Computer Interaction. A follow-up paper will be published in the
conference proceedings later this year. Also, an earlier publication
related to this
work is Reimer, Y.J., and Douglas, S.A. (2003). Teaching HCI Design
with
the Studio Approach. Computer Science Education Journal, Vol. 13, No. 3,
pp. 191-205.
I also continue work on my NSF Faculty
Early Career
Development (CAREER) Award (Grant No. 0545681). The goal of this
five-year,
$500,000 award is to study
how the process of notetaking is changing for students
in
higher education, and how we might better support this emerging
paradigm by offering critical software support.
We want to learn more about how the digital age affects the ability of
students to learn from and internalize their notes, and if the basic
components of notes are different than what they used to be prior to our
extensive reliance on electronic mediums. One of the anticipated outcomes
of this work is an electronic notebook (eNotebook) application that
supports the most crucial functions for student note takers, that works
seamlessly in conjunction with other electronic sources, and that is
accessible from a wide variety of locations and computer platforms.
Our research team recently completed a range of extensive user studies to
learn more about current notetaking practices. These studies included
interviewing 70 students from different disciplines across campus,
administering over 300 questionnaires, and "shadowing" 32 students during
part of their typical academic day. After analyzing the results of these
studies, we derived software requirements for an eNotebook system, which
we are now actively prototyping. We presented our initial low-fidelity
prototypes-which took the form of hand-drawn sketches and digital screen
mock-ups-to a series of five separate focus groups for feedback. Our
current eNotebook prototype
is semi-functional (or medium fidelity). It provides critical
functionality
that allows users to include files of different types in their notebooks
(e.g., text documents, pdf files, web pages, images, etc.), it allows
users to record their own notes or annotations of those files, and it
provides flexible means for the organization and storage of notes. When we
reach the next stable point in system implementation, we will gather more
user feedback on our design to incorporate in the next round of iterative
development. In June of 2007, we presented our work at
The 2007
International Conference on Frontiers in Education: Computer Science and
Computer Engineering.
We are always looking for students to help us evaluate
our prototype designs. If you are interested in participating in
any of
the user studies and evaluations surrounding this work, or know of someone
else who might be, please contact me at reimer at cs dot umt dot edu
. In the meantime, stay posted for updates on these exciting projects!
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