As kids get ready to head back to school, and as college students get ready to move back to their dorms and apartments, Consumer Reports has published an article discussing whether an e-reader is the right student purchase to make.  The exciting part is they base the entire article around our study of e-reader usage among grad students. Two things in this article are exciting to me. First, they quote Professor Charlotte Lee making a pretty clear statement about whether…

This column in today’s Chicago Tribune theorizes about what will happen to printed books and physical bookstores in the coming years.  I have to say that I agree with many of the points made, particularly when Keilman talks about printed books having a future. He also rightly points out that big-box bookstores may not be around forever, or at least competing big-box bookstores (Borders’ demise is sort of the premise/focus of the column). The column is exciting, however, because Keilman…

Earlier this week, Amazon announced that they would begin renting out textbooks on Kindle devices.  What’s cool is that two of the articles (on CNET and GeekWire) cite our research on e-reader use among university students. The CNET article in particular has some actual commentary on elements of our findings, particularly cognitive mapping; it’s nice to see at least one comment lauding the CNET article for bringing this up. It’s particularly fun to see your academic research get referenced in…

As we reported last month, our accepted paper “The Imposition and Superimposition of Digital Reading Technology: The Academic Potential of E-readers” won an Honorable Mention award at CHI 2011.  On Monday, we issued a press release through the UW that described the highlights of our research. Happily, that press release was picked up by a number of other folks that very same day: PCMag – Study: E-Readers Need Work Before Schools Toss Out Textbooks GeekWire – UW study of Kindle usage…

CSC Lab members Katie Derthick and Behzod Sirjani were recently informed that their proposed mobile phone application, “Making Memories,” was selected as a runner up in the activity design contest sponsored by TORURG (the University of Toronto Ubiquitous Computing Research Group). The contest was a call for proposals of applications that would utilize the web-based activity service that TORURG members built, with the goal of exploring the possible applications that such a service could support. “Making Memories” is an application…

CSC Lab recently received notice that our accepted paper “The Imposition and Superimposition of Digital Reading Technology: The Academic Potential of E-readers” has also received an “Honorable Mention” award from the conference committee of CHI conference on Human-Computer Interaction . The CHI 2011 Papers and Notes Committee selected only the top 5% of Papers and Notes submissions to receive the “Honorable Mention” designation. Congratulations to all the authors: Alex Thayer, Charlotte P. Lee (lab director), Linda Hwang, Heidi Sales, Pausali…

Charlotte P. Lee, Director of the Computer Supported Collaboration Laboratory (CSC Lab), was informed today that she has been granted the 2011 HCDE Junior Faculty Innovator Award. Departmental awards are new to HCDE this year. Therefore, Charlotte is the first faculty member to receive the HCDE Junior Faculty Innovator Award. Judy Ramey, head of the awards committee, says: “We are very impressed with your outstanding record of research across a number of cutting-edge domains, and for your record of including…

Following a recent group meeting, Behzod Sirjani (our newest CSC Lab member) posted to his personal blog his thoughts on being an “intellectual child” of a valued mentor and what it means to be a scholar. The conversations one has with a mentor can plant seeds for ideas that can last a lifetime. The first few sentences are excerpted below to pique your interest, but the whole post is well worth reading. “An idea is like a parasite. Resilient, highly…

Betsy Rolland, HCDE PhD student and CSC Lab member is researching coordination and support of collaborative biomedical research. She is also the Project Manager for the Asia Cohort Consortium Coordinating Center at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA. The Asia Cohort Consortium (ACC) is a biomedical research collaboration comprised of more than 20 Asia-based cohort studies seeking to build a collective cohort of over a million people. The New England Journal of Medicine article below is a…

Hayes,  G., Lee, C. P., Dourish, J.P. 2011. “Organizational routines, innovation, and flexibility: the application of narrative networks to dynamic workflow.” International Journal of Medical Informatics. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2011.01.005 Abstract Objective The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how current visual representations of organizational and technological processes do not fully account for the variability present in everyday practices. We further demonstrate how narrative networks can augment these representations to indicate potential areas for successful or problematic adoption of new technologies…