October 10, 2007

Michael Twidale
Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois.

Over The Shoulder Learning: Informal social learning of computer applications, and the implications it has for design.

Abstract

For many years I have been investigating issues of usability and HCI in collaborative contexts of CSCW and CSCL. I am especially interested in the recurrent problems of how people actually figure out how to use new applications, new versions of old applications, new uses for applications, how to integrate their applications with other applications and new hardware, software and operating systems, and how to cope as needs change, opportunities arise and things break down. Time and again the answr seems to be that people do these activities of adopting, adapting, tailoring, appropriating innovating, coping, learning, sharing, teaching and helping socially - and often informally, indeed unofficially.

Based on a number of different studies and explorations of design spaces through rapid prototyping, this talk will explore how these issues play out in the workplace, in domestic technologies, in ubicomp, in cyberinfrastructure, in schools and in competitive computer cgames.

By affordance analysis I will try and show the perhaps surprising *social* learning affordances of web pages, mashups, large displays, cellphones and unix, and what they can tell us about designing future interfaces to explicitly support collaborative learnability.

Michael Twidale is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science of the University of Illinois. His research involves the intersections of HCI, CSCW, CSCL, and increasingly ubicomp. With a background in computer science, he draws on methods from education theory, ethnography and library and information science to explore designing and use in context. He is particularly interested in the development of new methods to support very rapid prototyping and evaluation of applications, design spaces and research spaces.

http://people.lis.uiuc.edu/~twidale/

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