Interactions Magazine: Cover story by Dennis Littky, looking at the UX of high schools and colleges.

I'm out and about with no time to blog. Even so, I had to post a link to one of my favorite magazines, ACM's Interactions. Here is the introduction to the most recent issue, which comes with membership in ACM SIGCHI:

July / August, 2010

The cover story of a recent issue of Interactions Magazine is written by Dennis Littky, who focuses on ways to improve the success of our high schools and colleges, from a UX perspective:

Cover Story
Time Goes By, Everything Looks the Same. 
Dennis Littky
Full article for Free! 

More:

interactions: subtlety and change
Jon Kolko
Full article for Free! 

"There are some strange changes under way in our world. We constantly hear the refrain of the massive chaos around us, yet the allure of such a large, looming flux may distract us from something more important: the countless tiny, nuanced, and fundamental ways in which our culture and society are advancing. This issue of interactions describes these subtleties and teases them out of the greater topics that we've grown accustomed to discussing: environmental change, the role of education and government in a technological society, and the nature of behavior."

Click to continue reading this article.

CCC/CRA Roadmapping for Interactive Technology: Series of 3 Game Changing Workshops

The following information is from the CCC/CRA Roadmapping for Interactive Technologies website, describing an upcoming series of three three-day workshops that I think have the potential for changing the way interactive technology is designed and implemented in the future:

"The modern computing experience is shaped by the ways in which people interact with their computers. Underlying that interaction are the technologies of input, sensing, interactive techniques and interactive architecture. This is a series of workshops that will create a research agenda for revolutionizing these foundational technologies."

Workshops

Interactive System Architecture - August 11-13, 2010 - Jackson, WY http://icie.cs.byu.edu/CCCWorkshops/InteractiveArchitecture.html

Dan Olsen - Brigham Young University  

The last few decades have produced many new interactive technologies and many interactive techniques. Few of them are making their way into actual use because they are so hard to integrate. This workshop will create an agenda for new architectures for building interactive systems that integrate basic interaction in powerful new ways and provide new opportunities and foundations on which to build usable systems.

Persuasive Experiences - September 23-25, 2010 - Burbank, CA   http://icie.cs.byu.edu/CCCWorkshops/Persuasive.html

Joe Marks - Disney Research

A culture is defined by its shared stories and the messages that people communicate with each other. Computing has created new ways for stories to be told in entertainment and education. This workshop will outline how we can bring digital storytelling from the realm of multimillion dollar productions down to the practical needs of everyday social, educational and political discourse.

Ultra-large-scale Interaction - October 25-27, 2010 - Chicago, IL http://icie.cs.byu.edu/CCCWorkshops/Ultra-large-scale.html

Mark Ackerman - University of Michigan

A byproduct of the Internet's success is that large numbers of people can interact with each other and with large stores of loosely interconnected data. This workshop will create an agenda for interactions that involve thousands of participants.

NOTE:  Organizers for the Interactive System Architecture Workshop include Dan Olsen, from Brigham Young University, Andy Wilson, from Microsoft Research, and Celine Latulipe, from the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.  (Dr. Latulipe was my HCI professor.)  Joe Marks is a VP at Disney Research.  The organizers for the Ultra-large Scale Interaction Workshop include Mark Ackerman and Mark Newman, from the University of Michigan, Keith Edwards, from Georgia Tech, and Scott Klemmer, from Stanford.


I'd really like to attend all three workshops.  I will try to learn all I can about these workshops and share what I find during periodic blog posts over the next several months.


RELATED
Links on the CCC/CRA Website
Welcome
Approach/Participation
Workshop Attendence Information

Events

Interactive System Architecture Workshop

Aug 11-13, 2010
Submit: June 14

Persuasive Experiences Workshop

Sept 23-25, 2010
Submit: July 1

Ultra-large-scale Interaction Workshop

Oct 25-27, 2010
Submit: July 19

Links  NSF   CRA / CCC  ACM / SIGCHI

CCC Liason: Elizabeth Mynatt - Georgia Tech

An Example of Convergence: Interactive TV : uxTV 2008

I missed this one!



Jeremy Vaught, the administrator of the New Media Facebook group, posted about the the First International Conference on Designing Interactive User Experiences for TV and Video, held October 22-24, 2008 in Silicon Valley, California. The conference was sponsored by Microsoft Mediaroom, and ifip (International Federation for Information Processing).

According to the conference website, the papers from the conference can be found in the ACM digital library, AICPS: UZTV'08.

Featured speakers included Jakob Nielson (usability guru), Elissa Lee (Sr. Director of Research, TiVo), Gunthar Hartwig (User Experience, YouTube), and Dale Herigstad (Chief Creative Officer, Schematic).

Here is a sample of the topics covered during the conference:

Designing for User Experience: What to Expect from Mobile 3D TV and Video?
(Satu Jumisko-Pyykko, Mandy Weitzel, & Dominik Strohmeier)

The Concept of Interactivity - revisited: Four new typologies for a new media landscape
(Jens F. Jensen)

The Interactive Television User Experience So Far
(William Cooper)

Absolute Pointing and Tracking based Remote Control for Interactive User Experience
(John Sweetser, Anders Grunnet-Jepsen, and Gopal Panchanathan, ThinkOptics Inc.)

Network Analysis of Massively Collaborative Creation of Multimedia Contents: Case Study of Hatsune Miku videos on Nico Nico Duoga (Masahiro Hamasaki, Hideaki Takeda, Takuichi Nishimura)

The uxtv08 website has links to information about the various demos that were presented at the conference. To save you time, I've linked them below:

Demos

Data Driven Interactive 'Lower Third' - Vikram Singh

Dynamic TV: a New Inter-tainment Paradigm for Television - Marina Geymonat, Rossana Simeoni, Monica Perrero, Elena Guercio, Maurizio Belluati, Agnese Vellar and Roberto Montanari

Interactive advertising on n-tv plus - Kathrin Damian, Christian Bopp, Lars-Eric Mann

Interactive Live Demo of Fraunhofer FOKUS Media Interoperability Lab - Oliver Friedrich, Robert Seeliger, Benjamin Zachey, Christian Riede and Stefan Arbanowski

Microsoft Windows Media Center - Linda Chan

Microsoft Mediaroom - Linda Chan and David Giusti

Multi-dimensional Direct Pointing Remote Control for Interactive User Experience - John Sweetser, Anders Grunnet-Jepsen and Gopal Panchanathan

Tarae: Prototype of new interface design for digital TV browsing and navigation system - Hyun Suk Kim, Joung Young Lee and Sang Pil Hwang