lectures

Source: Flickr

Check out the creativity of SI students - the collection of student sketchnotes from danah boyd's talk at the JSB symposium last week is now online!

Sketchnotes are just visual notes - they use pictures, doodles, typography, etc. to represent concepts rather than taking verbatim notes. Studies have shown that this type of visual notetaking actually helps you focus more during a talk, and also helps you remember more of the details later. Sketchnotes have been popularized recently by people like Mike Rohde, whose sketchnotes from SxSW and other conferences have circulated widely on the web.

Participating students (in order of sketchnotes):

* Yang-Chen (Avalon) Hu, Human-Computer Interaction student
* Colleen Theisen, Tailored student
* Katie McCurdy, Human-Computer Interaction student
* Laura Rodrian, Tailored student
* Jeremy Canfield, Tailored student
* Dug Song, local entrepreneur
* Debra Lauterbach, Human-Computer Interaction and Social Computing student
* Elaine Engstrom, Human-Computer Interaction and Library & Information Services alum

Check out the showcase page of the whole collection here.

Today Tyler Bell, Product Manager for the Geo Technologies group at
Yahoo!, spoke at SI on the subject of Geo Informatics (or as the wikipedia entry puts it, geoinformatics.

Talk Description: Location-Aware Applications are all the rage in today's
technology and start-up scene. Yet understanding location and providing
the best user experience entails much more than simply putting dots on a
map. This short talk provides an overview of how Yahoo! tackles
geographic context and entity recognition to connect our users with the
world around them.

Read on for notes from SOCHI attendees!

This week Lena Mamykina a PhD candidate at the Human Centered Computing program of the Georgia Institute of Technology spoke about her work creating ubiquitous computing applications for diabetes management. While most research on healthcare monitoring focuses solely on data capture, Mamykina's applications allow individuals to reflect on the data and learn from their experiences, increasing the patient's feelings of self-efficacy.

Source: Flickr

This week Michigan Usability Professionals’ Association and the University of Michigan student chapter of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society hosted an event at the Veterans Administration National Center for Patient Safety (NCPS). There were many SI alums on hand including Michael Beasley, MIUPA President and User Experiologist at Pure Visibility, and the night's main speaker Linda Williams from NCPS.

Andrea Forte is a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology where she does research on human-centered computing with a focus on social computing and learning sciences. A video of her lecture "Learning in Public: Information Literacy and New Social Technologies in Schools" is a available for SI students and faculty here.

How can technologies enhance the usability, ubiquity and usefulness of computational systems in everyday work? This is the question Stephen Voida posed to SI faculty and students at his lecture "User Interface Design to Support Real-World Information Work Practices" (see the video of the lecture here).

Aniket Kittur's research on distributed cognition examines how groups of people can collaborate to process information on a scale that exceeds individual cognitive capabilities. For example, he investigates how large social collaborative knowledge systems such as Wikipedia and del.icio.us function and can be made more effective. Kittur is a post-doc in HCI at Carnegie Mellon and a visiting researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center. Video of the lecture can be found here.

Human Agency was the focus of the talk by Amy Voida, a researcher at the University of Calagary's Interactions Lab, and an HCI faculty candidate at SI (see the video of her lecture here). She spoke about three areas of her research related to human agency:

• the role of agency in constructing the meaning of technology in collaborative console gaming

The School of Information recently had the pleasure of hosting HCI researcher and University of Sheffield Professor Steve Whittaker. If you missed his lecture "The Future of Our Pasts: Digital Memories and Lifelogging" you can watch a recent Google talk he gave on the same subject here: