Resources for HCI Education

ACM interactions, Volume 2, No. 2, pp. 5-7.

Gary Perlman, Ohio State University

The most relevant links are listed under Education

Table of Contents

Introduction

Update on Previous Resources Columns

This is the fourth installment on resources on HCI. Since the first three on the World-Wide Web (WWW), FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), and User Interface Guidelines and Standards, materials have been updated continuously, and now these columns are available in an interactive form over the World-Wide Web (WWW); this article is available at 22-edu.html, a name that is based on the interactions volume and issue number and the topic of the column. The online version points to previous articles (which have been updated with news of developments such as the creation of a WWW version of the HCI FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) available at: http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/people/ematias/faq/contents.html.

Rationale for an HCI Education Column

The topic for this column is educational resources in HCI, one that represents the culmination of my tenure as the ACM SIGCHI Education Chair from 1991-1994. Although many of us are beyond our formal educational training, we all must continue life-long learning activities, especially in a field as dynamic as HCI. Additionally, those of us in academia look to others in education for teaching ideas, and those of us in industry look to educators for students to hire. The online resources described here are useful for many of these activities. That is not to say online resources are the only resources, of course. For example, Jean Gasen of Virginia Commonwealth University is the editor for the education column for the ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, which carries articles on a range of subtopics (the Bulletin is experimenting with online delivery).

General Resources for HCI Education

The following resources should be of interest to anyone interested in HCI education, whether as a student, educator, or employer. After presenting general resources, I'll turn to resources for creating courses, and for the training of researchers.

An HCI Educators Mailing List

Mailing lists bring together people with interests even more specific than newsgroups such as comp.human-factors, which has few articles relevant to education, or comp.edu, which has few articles relevant to HCI. The CHI-Educators mailing list has hundreds of addresses of people interested in HCI education. It is a good place to discuss course planning ideas, educational resources, experiences, etc. To join the CHI-Educators list, send an email message to listserv@acm.org with the body of the message (not the Subject: line, which is ignored) containing:
	subscribe CHI-Educators Firstname Lastname
You can get help with the ACM LISTSERV by sending mail to: listserv@acm.org with the body of the message containing:
	help
There is also a mailing list for students: chi-Students. To join the chi-Students list, follow the instructions for the Educators, substituting Students for Educators.

A Survey of HCI Education

Gary Perlman and Jean Gasen have created an ongoing online survey of educational opportunities in HCI. The survey can be used by students to find educational opportunities, by educators to share ideas, or by employers to find employee candidates and research affiliates. The survey reports contain information on over 75 programs and 180 faculty and 160 courses. You can browse the HCI Education Survey on the World-Wide Web at http://www.acm.org/sigchi/educhi/ or send email for more information to: chi-educators-request@acm.org

Resources for Preparing Courses in HCI

Materials for a Course on User Interface Development

The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) curriculum module and support materials on "User Interface Development" were developed to help software engineering faculty prepare course material on analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation of user interfaces. The support materials include presentation slide masters, exercises, etc. You can ftp a text version of the module from: ftp.cis.ohio-state.edu (128.146.8.52) in: /pub/hci/SEI. The figures in module.txt have been recreated in text graphics. The bibliography in biblio.txt does not include abstracts or tables of contents because these are available in the HCI Bibliography. The SEI material represented an early attempt to help educators teach about HCI-related material, and was influential in later HCI curriculum efforts.

ACM SIGCHI Recommendations for Curricula

The 1992 ACM SIGCHI Curriculum Development Group Report "Curricula for Human Computer Interaction", contains a survey of the nature of HCI, designs for suggested first courses, HCI curriculum designs, and a variety of resources to help people teach HCI. It was developed over a three year period under the direction of Tom Hewett of Drexel University.

You can browse the report at http://www.acm.org/sigchi/cdg.

NSF/ARPA Recomemndations for HCI Education

A report based on an NSF/ARPA workshop held in Washington, DC in February 1994, "New Directions in HCI Education, Research, and Practice" is available via the WWW (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/arpa/hci/directions/TitlePage.html). (Availability via ftp and GOPHER is planned.) This report expands on the ACM SIGCHI curricular recommendations, and also considers the future of research in HCI.

Textbooks on HCI

A major force for the improvement of HCI education is the appearance of textbooks for teaching HCI. One book in particular, by Jenny Preece and five others, represents what I consider the first pedagogically-designed textbook for general use in undergraduate and graduate level instruction. My review of Preece et al's book appears in the final 1994 SIGCHI Bulletin, 26:4, pp. 82-85, and can be read on the World-Wide Web at: http://www.acm.org/~perlman/preece.html.

Another textbook, which was featured in interactions, 1:2, p. 12, is well suited for practitioners. Clayton Lewis & John Rieman's "Task-Centered User Interface Design" is the first online shareware book on HCI-material. It is available via anonymous ftp at: ftp.cs.colorado.edu in: /pub/cs/distribs/clewis/HCI-Design-Book. I wrote a script to generate a WWW page to access the chapters (http://www.acm.org/~perlman/uidesign.html).

For information about other textbooks and popular books for HCI education, see my reading list at: http://www.acm.org/~perlman/readings.html.

Resources on Educating Researchers in HCI

HCI Theses in Progress

The HCI TIP (Theses in Progress) list provides information on research by students. It was created by Rodney Fuller and taken over by Karl Steiner. Mikael Eriksson, who is the current list administrator, set up a Web page so people could browse the TIP list on the World-Wide Web. Additionally, the SIGCHI Bulletin often contains abstracts of interest, such as recent dissertations in HCI.

A Freeware Statistical Package

My |STAT Data Analysis Package for UNIX and DOS has been used by educators and researchers for over 15 years. It is not a comprehensive package, but it supports most of the analyses done for empirical research in HCI. Source code and documentation is freely available via anonymous ftp from: ftp.cis.ohio-state.edu (128.146.8.52) in: /pub/stat as described in the WWW URL: http://www.acm.org/~perlman/statinfo.html.

The HCI Bibliography

A cornerstone to research in any field is access to the literature. The HCI Bibliography is a free access online bibliography on most of HCI. The bibliography contains over 10,000 abstracted entries. You can ftp the material from: ftp.hcibib.org or send email for more information to: director@hcibib.org or you can browse the HCI Bibliography on the World-Wide Web. The HCI Bibliography will be the focus of a future column on HCI Resources.

Next resources department: Bibliographies on HCI

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