Background

Full Proposal [PDF]

From 2011-2014, the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee sponsored a project to investigate the present and future of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) education [1]. Research consisted of 52 interviews conducted with SIGCHI community members, as well as 616 surveys completed in English, 156 in Brazilian Portuguese, 52 in Mandarin Chinese, and 48 in Chilean Spanish. Questions focused on what educators, practitioners, and students considered to be top priorities for the field of HCI. Additionally, educational resources were compiled and discussions were hosted at the annual CHI conferences, including discussion lunches, HCI education workshops, and SIGCHI Town Hall meeting discussions [1].

A recurring theme that emerged throughout the project was participants’ desire for a collection of online resources shared among HCI educators. The goal is to create a community of practice (CoP) of HCI scholars and educators, sharing and collaborating to develop course outlines, curricula, and teaching material, known as a living curriculum [2].

A CoP is a group “of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis” [3]. CoPs are viewed as an inventive way to combine working, learning, and innovating [4]. Learning and knowledge creation occur through socialization, and members of the community often develop a set of shared resources to engage more effectively [5]. A growing number of Open Educational Resources (OER) are being shared, reused, and republished, supporting collaborative teaching and learning [6, 7].

There are currently very few CoPs related to HCI Education. The HCI Bibliography: Education in HCI webpage [8] contains a collection of resources for students and educators interested in HCI. However, it is not considered a CoP in which HCI educators can share content related to HCI curricula. Similarly, the current infrastructure of the SIGCHI HCI Education Community [9] does not support the envisioned communication and sharing of resources of a CoP of HCI Educators. Therefore, before the living curriculum can become a reality, there is a need to investigate outside community platforms or methods of extending the current infrastructure.

A workshop on developing the HCI living curriculum was held at the CHI2014 conference [10]. Several visions of what this new curriculum could be were presented. More recently, a qualitative study consisting of a series of individual semi-structured interviews with HCI educators was conducted at the CHI2017 Conference in Denver, Colorado, May 6-11, 2017 [11]. The aim of the study was to investigate the preliminary framework of a HCI living curriculum CoP. In particular, the authors were interested in the following three research questions:

  1. How do stakeholders envision a HCI living curriculum?
  2. What are the requirements for a HCI living curriculum?
  3. What are the barriers to a HCI living curriculum?

The paper presents preliminary ideas, use cases, and design requirements for a HCI living curriculum, based on data collected from HCI scholars and educators [11]. However, to this day, the proposed CoP has not been designed nor implemented.

This workshop focuses on developing the conceptual framework for the HCI living curriculum CoP. Participants will be asked to produce a position paper outlining their vision of the CoP and living curriculum. Through collaborative brainstorming and ideation exercises, participants will also articulate the information architecture and infrastructure of the CoP as well as its long-term viability. Post-workshop initiatives will aim to move toward implementing a live version of the CoP for further iterations.

While this workshop is targeting participants with research interests in the area of HCI education, its scope is much broader. Indeed, we will make an effort to recruit participants who are interested in the design of collaborative UIs and/or applying a User-Centered Design (UCD) approach to the design of CoPs.

The goals of the workshop are:

  • To develop the conceptual framework and user experience of the HCI living curriculum;
  • To assess what tools, platforms and services may already be available and to assess their long-term viability and value to the HCI community;
  • To articulate the information architecture and infrastructure for a CoP of HCI educators;
  • To create working groups to implement the first iteration of the HCI living curriculum post-workshop.

References

  1. Elizabeth F. Churchill, Anne Bowser, and Jennifer Preece. 2013. Teaching and learning human-computer interaction: past, present, and future. interactions 20, 2 (March 2013), 44-53. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2427076.2427086
  2. Elizabeth F. Churchill, Anne Bowser, and Jennifer Preece. 2016. The future of HCI education: a flexible, global, living curriculum. interactions 23, 2 (February 2016), 70-73. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2888574
  3. Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder. 2002. Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Press, 284 pp.
  4. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. 2001. Structure and spontaneity: knowledge and organization. In Ikujiro Nonaka and David J. Teece (eds.), Managing Industrial Knowledge: Creation, Transfer and Utilization. London, England: Sage, 24 pp.
  5. Ettore Bolisani and Enrico Scarso. 2014. The place of communities of practice in knowledge management studies: a critical review. Journal of Knowledge Management, vol. 18 no. 2, pp. 366-381.
  6. Kati Clements, Jan Pawlowski, and Nikos Manouselis. 2015. Open educational resources repositories literature review: towards a comprehensive quality approaches framework. Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 51, part B, pp. 1098-1106.
  7. Yannis Dimitriadis, Patrick McAndrew, Gráinne Conole and Elpida Makriyannis. 2009. New design approaches to repurposing open educational resources for collaborative learning using mediating artefacts. In ascilite 2009: Same places, different spaces, (Auckland, NZ; 6-9 December 2009), 8 pp.
  8. ACM SIGCHI. HCI Bibliography : HCI Webliography : Education in HCI. 2015. Retrieved October 13, 2017 from http://hcibib.org/education/
  9. ACM SIGCHI. The HCI Education Community. 2014. Retrieved October 13, 2017 from http://prior.sigchi.org/communities/hci-ed
  10. Elizabeth F. Churchill, Jennifer Preece, and Anne Bowser. 2014. Developing a living HCI curriculum to support a global community. In CHI ’14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 135-138. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2559206.2559236
  11. Andrea Jovanovic, Olivier St-Cyr, and Mark Chignell. 2017. Designing the HCI living curriculum. Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association Conference. Toronto, ON: Canada.