“A Lament for the Bookshelf” – The Globe and Mail An interesting read! Russel Smith takes a walk down memory lane as he explains what his [paper] books mean. Here is an interesting quote from his article, describing the tumult his books have been through: “They have been moved from student room to disastrous relationship to shared house to storage locker for 20 years now, and they have not suffered, indeed they have proliferated as they migrated, like a great…

Charlotte, Alex and I all attended the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Savannah, GA a few weeks ago. CSCW focuses on the intersection of technology and collaboration, and is one of the key venues for our work. Charlotte and I attended a workshop on The Changing Dynamics of Scientific Collaborations. Charlotte was one of the organizers of the workshop, along with Cecilia Aragon, Jeffrey Heer, and Claudio Silva, and we presented a position paper on Stakeholders in…

The convergence of different types of functionality and platforms continues to generate interesting new devices.  While the iPhone remains one of the stand-out devices that converged loads of stuff in one place, it’s still not an ideal gaming platform.  Other phones that attempted to offer high-quality gaming experiences never caught on for a variety of reasons, so maybe the solution is to start with a gaming platform instead! Enter the Nintendo DSi XL.  It will include e-reader capabilities, but in…

Charlotte, Matt, and Alex are at CSCW 2010 in Savannah, GA right now (early February).  You can view the proceedings here, including the poster that Alex, Charlotte, and Matt produced from the group’s Google Calendar study. The proceedings include the 2-page extended abstract; at the conference, Alex presented the proper poster from the research. Fast fact: The first CSCW conference took place in 1986; Jonathan Grudin wrote an interesting piece in 1994 describing the earlier days of the conference, as…

I returned a few days ago from a wonderful 4 day trip to Copenhagen. My main reason for visiting was to serve on the dissertation committee for Kjeld Schmidt’s student, Mika Yasuoka at the IT University of Copenhagen. Mika wrote a very interesting and thought provoking dissertation looking at the creation of project jargon to facilitate collaboration during short-term projects. After a 50 minute presentation and 10 minute break, the 3 committee members (Yvonne Dittrich, Bosse Helgeson, and myself) each…

As you probably know by now, Apple announced and demonstrated the iPad today. While it has a number of interesting and, at first glance, impressive features, I was mostly curious how it would handle books. Specifically, would the iPad do anything differently than the Kindle, or the other e-readers out there? Well, it’s still a little early to tell, but I do know this: It looks pretty cool. For example, watch the first demo video here. I dare you not…

Don’t laugh.  Apparently this is coming soon: Check out the coverage here. Interesting that Amazon is coming out with an SDK (but it’s really a KDK – Kindle Development Kit) at this point in the history of the Kindle device.  I’m even more curious to see how people react to navigating content on a Kindle, or gaming on a Kindle.  I could see Space Invaders doing okay as a casual game, I suppose.

We all knew the Kindle wouldn’t be the only digital reading device (DRD) on the market forever.  The last year or two has seen rapid development of new DRDs, new ways to obtain content, new formats for content, and so on.  But CES 2010 marks the first appearance of some interesting new DRDs, some of which are explicitly designed for specific market segments. Exhibit A: The Plastic Logic Que. The Que is for business travelers, although I wouldn’t mind getting…

The CSC Lab has received official word from the NSF and is pleased to announce that lab director Charlotte Lee has been awarded a coveted NSF CAREER Award! This is great news for the lab to start off the new year with. From the NSF website: The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration…