Making a Difference:
Integrating Socially Relevant Projects into HCI Teaching
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Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
CHI 2006, April 22–27, 2006, Montreal, Canada.
ACM 1-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Abstract
Enriching courses on human-computer interaction with socially-relevant projects provides a compelling opportunity for students to improve their education and make socially beneficial contributions. By having clearly defined user communities outside the classroom, students have the chance to practice their interview, observation, and usability testing skills, while developing projects that continue beyond the semester. These projects often give students life-changing exposure to genuine needs and impressive results to include in their portfolio when seeking employment. Educators will present their strategies for arranging, supervising, and grading these projects. Students will describe their experience and how it influenced them.
Keywords
Education, social impact, making a difference, team projects, relevance, service learning
ACM Classification Keywords
H5.0. Information interfaces K.3 Computers and Education
Introduction: Ben Shneiderman
Researchers in human-computer interaction can take pride in the successful growth of this topic over the past 25 years. Much work remains to be done, including to raising awareness among many academics and industry professionals, but we might now reflect on how and what we teach the next generation of students. This panel presents diverse approaches to integrating socially relevant themes and projects into HCI courses.
How shall we educate students about the great successes, while making them aware of the dangers? How can we engage, motivate, and encourage them to devote some of their energies to making the world a better place, even while they are students. The panel participants believe in educating students about social issues, and engaging them in meaningful projects. We believe that the strong skills of many students and the power of the internet can be harnessed to produce socially beneficial outcomes during the semester. My own approach applies the Relate-Create-Donate philosophy: students working in teams to produce ambitious projects for the benefit of someone outside the classroom (Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies, (MIT Press, 2002).
Many instructors have developed creative approaches to finding projects for students, or they rely on students to use their personal, family, community, campus, or work-related contacts to find appropriate projects. Some instructors focus on improving the campus, others deal with special communities such as residents of old-age homes, patients in hospitals, or low-income neighborhoods. Some seek wider circles of applications such as to charitable, social service, or environmental organizations. Some instructors have global perspectives and seek to support international aid organizations or develop appropriate technologies for developing nations.
Panelists will explore alternative approaches and the range of goals we seek. They will describe how they integrate these concerns into courses and what outcomes they have achieved. A special feature will be to invite students from courses to present their projects and describe how the experience affected them.
Panelist: Ann Bishop
The Community Informatics Initiative (CII) works with people to build community networks, community technology centers, communityware, and library services. At the core of the CII is the pedagogical process for engaged citizenship called community inquiry: collaborative action connected to people's values, history, and lived experiences; models of engagement that are just, participatory, and open-ended; and the integration of theory and practice in an experimental and critical manner.
Community inquiry is a process of transforming situations, not simply acquiring knowledge or skills; it involves embodied action in the world. Through service-learning courses, practica, research, and volunteering, students work with real communities to address problems and develop capacity. For example, in the Paseo Boricua Community Library Project, based in Chicago’s Puerto Rican Cultural Center, teachers, professors, college and high school students, community activists, and museum and library professionals collaborated to bring the “Not Enough Space” exhibit (representing the art and experiences of two Paseo Boricua political prisoners) to the University of Illinois Library. Digital media played many roles in this learning activity, from coordinating tasks to publicity to documenting the exhibit.High school students in Paseo Boricua participated in a course called “Community Librarianship,” where they worked with university faculty and students to develop a free web-based library catalog.
This presentation describes how we use community inquiry as a framework for student learning in the CII, including its pleasures, the thorny issues it raises, and the administrative and logistical problems it can cause.
Panelist: Batya Friedman
Along with standard criteria such as intellectual rigor and excellence, the University of Washington’s Information School holds out an additional educational goal: that of educating students to “make a difference.” While leaving room for student, faculty and programmatic autonomy, this goal impacts our student recruitment, curriculum, and teaching practices. In this panel, I briefly discuss two relevant curriculum efforts.
Undergraduate Informatics Major Capstone Experience. All undergraduate majors in UW’s Information School complete a capstone project. While no specific social impact requirement is mandated, students who express a desire to positively shape society are encouraged to frame projects with broad societal goals and often do so (e.g., Making Ecological Information Useable: Designing an Information System for the General Public, Chow, Hamilton & Kanov, 2003). Capstone projects, including those that address social issues, have been well received by employers.
Value Sensitive Design Course. The Value Sensitive Design course attracts students from across campus and across educational levels. Students apply Value Sensitive Design’s interactional theory and methods in a quarter-long project of their choosing. Projects have taken different forms: some initially motivated by concern with an overarching value (e.g. for community); others with a specific population or context (e.g., for older persons with diabetes); and otherswith a particular technology (e.g., for urban simulation). While some projects remained simply class projects, others resulted in system design for specific communities, input on technology policy for organizations, revision of research and system development directions for dissertation and faculty-led research, and in one case a CHI short paper.
In my remarks, I will address questions such as: What sort of projects – community service, mass-produced software, organizational practices and policy, research? The pros and cons of having students choose and develop their own projects? How to help students link their projects to on-going dissertation or faculty research? How to help students balance their own “designer values” with those of the individuals and organizations they are designing for?
Panelist: Jonathan Lazar
I believe that all classes should include real-world projects that include hands-on experience with users. There are two major reasons for this:First of all, students need to understand the societal impact of their work. By working with real-world organizations, students can learn that their vision of what computing is, very often does not equal the reality. Frequently, students do not understand the concept of a digital divide, as they are the “haves,” and do not experience the life of the “have nots.” I always ask students at the end of the semester what their biggest surprise was. One time, a student reported that “I couldn’t believe that this non-profit organization was still using a dial-up connection. I thought that everyone had, at minimum, cable access to the Internet.” When students get experience in the real world, they see that their computing expertise can be used to bridge gaps, and to perform beneficial tasks for society. These beneficial goals for society include increasing access to online health care information, online education for those that cannot attend face-to-face classes, reducing isolation and bigotry, and ensuring that computer interfaces are usable by all users, especially users with disabilities.
Second, a real-world project is a better exercise than a theoretical, classroom-based project. In a classroom, students are building interfaces for an ideal world without limitations or constraints. When working in real-world settings, students learn to balance the trade-offs between various user groups, stakeholders, design conflicts, and other time and resource limitations. Human-computer interaction has always been a multi-disciplinary field, where people from different backgrounds can have different perspectives on the same situation. Often, there is a fine line between the two extremes of the graphic designers (“it must look nice, who cares how it works?”), and the engineers “it must work well, who cares what it looks like?”). The students that become the most successful interface designers will be the individuals that can understand various perspectives, balance various viewpoints, and ensure that the needs of multiple stakeholders are met, all within time and budgetary constraints.
Panelist: Gary Marsden
We teach social issues in a variety of places: software engineering, HCI and a separate course in ethics and professional practice. The software engineering is particularly important as we are using it as a testing ground and working towards starting a separate stream in our undergraduate programme based around open-source software.
At postgraduate level, we take social issues very seriously. A key to all this is finding what constitutes research and what is purely development. This is important as any intervention we make into a community must help us (research findings) but must also be sustainable (requiring a development component). We therefore work with NGOs (such as bridges.org) to help us ensure that our work is sustainable and ethical. Also, we work with NGOs to develop guidelines for other researchers and aid agencies about how to conduct sensitive and worthwhile research within communities.
Panelist: Cliff Nass
My course in Winter Quarter involves heterogeneous groups of three students (at least one techie and one fuzzy in each group) to pick a problem or opportunity in the developing world, pick a user who has that problem or opportunity, and to then design an information product or service to address the problem or opportunity. What's cool is that there are about 100 students in the class and each group picks it own place and problem, so the breadth is awesome.
At the start of Spring Quarter, we do a "Big Idea Festival" in which 200 people from industry, NGOs, non-profits, etc. hear the student projects and then have a poster session. The original goal of the projects was to teach students to design for people very different from themselves. To my surprise, the true benefit of the projects came from the students coming to view the problems of the developing world as soluble; indeed, in one quarter, they were able to come up with a solution! It's that empowerment of the students that is truly remarkable and very powerful.