Jennifer Preece

University of Maryland, College Park | UMD, UMCP, University of Maryland College Park · College of Information Studies "iSchool"

This article examines community-driven adult environmental learning in a volunteer watershed stewards program. We look for evidence of elements that portray steps toward “concientización”—the process of individuals and communities directing their own learning in nonhierarchical ways. Leveraging two theories from the learning sciences and community...

In its 35 years, the CHI Community's remarkable research success has enabled an astonishing worldwide cultural transformation. CHI research on graphical user interfaces, touchscreens, hypertext, mobile devices, and social media have dramatically changed family/friend relationships, business, medical care, education, and much more. Many of the chang...

Within the context of a program focused on learning concepts and practices for keeping watersheds healthy and then completing community-based projects, we explore ways that NatureNet, a prototype mobile and web-based technology, can support volunteer watershed stewards. Using a mixed methods approach, our analysis of the experiences of 50 volunteer...

Designers of learning tools and spaces have focused on understanding learner interests and the features of online spaces (also known as affinity spaces) that allow them to share and collaborate. Pokemon Go provides a practical case to observe potential new connections between the affinity spaces and learning in place-based settings. In this study,...

StreamBED is an embodied VR training for citizen scientists to make qualitative stream assessments. Early findings garnered positive feedback about training qualitative assessment using a virtual representation of different stream spaces, but presented field-specific challenges; novice biologists had trouble interpreting qualitative protocols, and...

The Mbeere people of Kenya are an 'Information World' (IW). Within this IW is a Facebook Group named UVA: Universal Voice for All-The Chance for Mbeere! (UVA). We describe how UVA, as a people-led social media space is being indigenized through the online activity of sharing information to meet environmental stewardship needs. By indigenized we ref...

The results of a study on HCI education in 2014 prompted the proposal to create a living curriculum that responds to the needs of multiple stakeholders. A workshop held during CHI 2014 signaled coalescence in the requirements for the establishment of said curriculum. This workshop seeks to further explore among multiple diverse HCI educators on how...

Citizen science broadly describes citizen involvement in science. Citizen science has gained significant momentum in recent years, brought about by widespread availability of smartphones and other Internet and communications technologies (ICT) used for collecting and sharing data. Not only are more projects being launched and more members of the pu...

While scientists need the contributions of members of the public if they are to document biological diversity across large spaces and over long periods of time, it is challenging to recruit enough volunteers. Since many people use their smartphones to take pictures when they are in nature, it may be beneficial to understand what they gravitate towa...

As environmental groups utilize social media to increase the participation of citizens in contributing scientific data, the question of what kind of content will motivate user engagement becomes increasingly important. Using a Social Network Analysis framework and following on the heels of motivational studies, we examine the Facebook Fan Pages of...

Previous CSCW studies on citizen science have focused on supporting data collection, rather than data sharing among a wider audience. Here we describe the process by which citizen science data are collaboratively shared by individual and organizational social actors. Three sets of collabora-tive efforts are essential for enabling data to travel thr...

HCI education reflects the continual evolution of HCI, embracing the changing landscapes of technology, infrastructure, and technology use. This forum aims to provide a platform for HCI educators, practitioners, researchers, and students to share their perspectives, reflections, and experiences related to HCI education. --- Sukeshini Grandhi, Edito...

Increasingly, adults and children socialise and communicate online. Children's safe and secure online communication with people from all over the world can increase their understanding of other cultures, which is an important goal in today's multicultural world. Our research studied such interactions between children from three countries, Hungary,...

In the absence of systematic knowledge about the characteristics and practices of data collections, successful data hubs and other platforms that support collaborative data sharing are unlikely to be designed and built. We begin to fill this gap by performing an in depth case study of a global scientific data hub - the Encyclopedia of Life - in whi...

Crowdsourcing design has been applied in various areas of graphic design, software design, and product design. This paper draws on those experiences and research in diversity, creativity and motivation to present a process model for crowdsourcing experience design. Crowdsourcing experience design for volunteer online communities serves two purposes...

ACM SIGCHI supports research to understand the philosophies and practices that inform HCI education in order to support a broad community of students, academics, and industry practitioners around the globe. This workshop builds on 3 years of research and collaboration to engage the HCI community in developing a living curriculum for HCI. This inclu...

Citizen science supports public participation in scientific research. Increasingly new devices including sensors, smartphones, and technologies for validating and communicating data, are integrated into these practices. We suggest design, privacy and security guidelines.

The success of citizen science projects relies upon having enough contributions from citizens while the success of student-scientist partnerships (SSPs) depends on access to scientists. In this extended abstract, we introduce a field experiment conducted to investigate how online individualized feedback from scientists could influence college stude...

Citizen science projects increasingly incorporate the motivational affordances of games. However, the different user groups that gamified citizen science projects may attract are poorly understood. This project examines how two user groups, nature participants and gamer participants, experience Floracaching, a gamified mobile application for citize...

The article discusses the importance of sharing data while protecting privacy in citizen science. TaT is concerned that personal information about participants may become available on its website. In addition, uploaded photographs may include recognizable people, depicting whom they were with and where they were. TaT could have legal problems if su...

Gamifying citizen science campaigns has the potential to further engage existing volunteers, as well as to attract new contributors. By evaluating Biotracker, a gamified mobile application that gathers plant phenology data, we explored the feasibility of engaging a secondary group of Millennials, who are notorious technology enthusiasts, with a gam...

Previous research on long distance romantic relationships (LDRRs) has tended to focus on the two people that make up the couple. With the advent of LDRR online communities, however, there is a need to expand the analysis to include larger social structures. Currently little is known about how and why individuals who are in LDRRs use LDRR online com...

HCI (human-computer interaction) research has strongly affected the marketability of new technologies and networked systems. HCI emerged in the 1970s as a field of inquiry as a result of the increasing penetration of computers and computational devices into the workplace. There have been several efforts to outline core courses for a program in HCI....

Social network visualization is useful for under-standing the complex structure of collaborative efforts such as citizen science projects. It has been widely accepted by social network analysts for exploring and analyzing networks by visually showing their members, the relationships among them, and their behaviors and attributes. The strength of so...

This paper explores the opportunities and challenges of creating and sustaining large-scale, "content curation communities" through an in-depth case study of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). Content curation communities are large scale crowdsourcing endeavors that aim to curate existing content into a single repository, making these communities diff...

Large scale online environments, such as social networks, present an emerging phenomenon where millions of people come together online to share and consume information and socialize. In the past, ethnography was used extensively to provide a nuanced understanding of the relationship between technology and humans. The ways of "doing ethnography" hav...

A growing number of projects are solving complex computational and scientific tasks by soliciting human feedback through games. Many games with a purpose focus on generating textual tags for images. In contrast, we introduce a new game, Odd Leaf Out, which provides players with an enjoyable and educational game that serves the purpose of identifyin...

How social media are expanding traditional research and development topics for computer and information scientists.

It is a truism that, for innovative eHealth systems to have true value and impact, they must first and foremost be usable and accessible by clinicians, consumers, and other stakeholders. In this paper, current trends and future challenges in the usability and accessibility of consumer health informatics will be described. Consumer expectations of t...

New technologies are giving researchers new ways to work together to find information, compare and interpret research results, and share their knowledge. Collaboration tools range from commercial services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to specialized, discipline-specific collaboration tools. Yet, these tools are only useful if researchers...

Persuasion changes behavior. Persuasive people encourage us to do things we might not otherwise do, such as buying a new coat, taking a trip, changing jobs, and so on. Artifacts can persuade too: marketing specialists know that slick ads, sexy slogans, colorful packaging, empathic messages, elegant and beautiful designs are persuasive – they sell p...

Video sharing has become a growing social practice, with YouTube being the predominant online video sharing site. Most of the research concerning YouTube's social impact has been focused on quantitative evaluation of the social interaction facilitated by the tools embedded in the site. This study aims to explore the growth of the YouTube online com...

Costume design presents an opportunity to study image search, selection, and use within the context of visual communication. Interaction with images is fundamental to supporting many collaborative design practices. This paper presents emergent guidelines for a costume designer's workbench based on three case studies of costume-related image use dur...

Born Digital . Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. By John Palfrey and Urs Gasser . Basic Books, New York, 2008. 383 pp. $25.95, C$27.95. ISBN 9780465005154. Palfrey and Gasser explore what growing up in a digital world may mean for children and society.

Billions of people participate in online social activities. Most users participate as readers of discussion boards, searchers of blog posts, or viewers of photos. A fraction of users become contributors of user-generated content by writing consumer product reviews, uploading travel photos, or expressing political opinions. Some users move beyond su...

YouTube is a video sharing repository, enabling users to post, share and discuss videos. Its stated mission is to create "an online video community"; however, YouTube is not commonly thought of as a community. Our aim in this study is to answer the question whether users have a "sense of community" towards YouTube, and if such feelings exist - are...

The purpose of this study is to understand the laggard adoption of an SMS-based emergency alert system on a university campus. Based on findings from in-depth interviews and a focus group, we discuss some critical issues in designing and implementing such alert systems, with a focus on the socio- cultural factors that de-motivate people to use them...

This paper describes the initial stages of the participatory design of a community-oriented emergency response system for a university campus. After reviewing related work and the current University emergency response system, this paper describes our participatory design process, discusses initial findings from a design requirement survey and from...

Access to accurate and trusted information is vital in preparing for, responding to, and recovering from an emergency. To facilitate response in large-scale emergency situations, Community Response Grids (CRGs) integrate Internet and mobile technologies to enable residents to report information, professional emergency responders to disseminate inst...

This paper explores the concept of developing community response grids (CRGs) for community emergency response and the policy implications of such a system. CRGs make use of the Internet and mobile communication devices, allowing residents and responders to share information, communicate, and coordinate activities in response to a major disaster. T...

Online communities have become a key source of information and support for many people. These communities enable users and contributors to coordinate their activities. People from across the world regularly meet, greet, get to know each other and keep in contact via online communities; patients are helped to cope better with their diseases; student...

Although an increasing number of Web sites are devoted to providing health information to older adults, many sites have usability problems unique to this population. The purpose of this study was to explore the usability of three health-promoting Web sites specifically designed for use by older adults. This descriptive study used two usability asse...

Although an increasing number of Web sites are devoted to providing health information to older adults, many sites have usability problems unique to this population. The purpose of this study was to explore the usability of three health-promoting Web sites specifically designed for use by older adults. This descriptive study used two usability asse...

In the early days of the Internet, an occasional sarcastic or confrontational remark was considered part of its "charm." Times have changed.

This study reports the results of an online survey that generated 1188 responses from 375 online MSN communities. The survey examined the behavior and attitudes of participants who post (i.e., posters) and those who read but do not post (i.e., lurkers). The results of the analysis indicate that posters and lurkers go online for similar reasons. Whi...

Creating online communities of practice involves much more than creating software. Software houses online communities of practice activities but social interactions also depend on who is involved, what their goals are, their personalities and the community's norms and policies. By paying attention to these sociability issues, community members can...

This paper reviews the literature on inter-organizational information systems. It has long beenargued that information technology can have profound effects on the structure and process of inter-firm relationships. This proposition has gained additional ...

Using the Internet to conduct quantitative research presents challenges not found in conventional research. Paper-based survey quality criteria cannot be completely adapted to electronic formats. Electronic surveys have distinctive technological, demographic, and response characteristics that affect their design, use, and implementation. Survey des...

Creating online communities involves much more than creating software. Software houses online community activities but social interactions also depend on who is involved, what their goals are, personalities and policies. By paying attention to these sociability issues, community developers, managers and leaders can influence how a community develop...

Online communities (OCs) are seen as an important stimulus to electronic business. However, surprisingly little is known about how the communication activity of their users develops and changes over time. A longitudinal study bears the potential to better elaborate the enabling and inhibiting factors of the users' communication activity in OCs. To...

The rapid growth of personal email communica- tion, instant messaging and online communities has brought attention to the important role of interpersonal trust in online communication. An empirical study was conducted focusing on the eect of empathy on online interpersonal trust in textual IM. To be more specific, the relationship between empathic...

Using the Internet to conduct quantitative research presents challenges not found in conventional research. Some of our knowledge concerning the effective design and use of paper-based surveys does translate into electronic formats. However, electronic surveys have distinctive technological, demographic and response characteristics that affect how...

Why do lurkers lurk and what do they do? A number of studies have examined people’s posting behaviour on mailing lists (Sproull and Kiesler, 1991), bulletin board systems (Preece, 1998) and Usenet newsgroups (Smith, 2000) but studying lurkers is much harder because you don’t know when they are there or why. Although lurkers reportedly make up the m...

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last September shocked us all. Many reached for the telephone to contact loved ones and watched TV or listened to the radio for news in the days directly following the attacks. Others, however, sought support and exchanged information via online communities. In fact, some 30 million A...

Demographic communities can become on-line communities if their members have common interests, needs, and goals, a desire for mutual communication, and can easily find one another to establish relationships. People are sometimes quite resistant to interacting on-line even when they regularly use the Internet for information gathering and e-mail. Wi...

This paper puts forth a vision and a possible architecture for a community knowledge evolution system. We propose augmenting a multimedia document repository (digital library) with innovative knowledge evolution support, including computer-mediated communications, community process support, decision support, advanced hypermedia features, and concep...

This research is concerned with understanding the role a long established and thriving health bulletin board plays in the lives of its members; the impact of usability and sociability issues on group process, and the membership roles, patterns of social interaction, and group dynamics exhibited in the community. An ethnographic research approach is...

It was established early on in this study that a Language, Literacy and Culture Program (LLC) site is needed to keep the community connected. A community-centered design was considered, and implemented in the fall of 1999. The current study was implemented to assess why the site failed and what could be done to revive it. The findings of the curren...

This paper describes a program of research designed to understand how knowledge-sharing and learning can be supported in virtual communities. To conduct this research, we propose the development of a series of knowledge sharing tools and procedures followed by a rigorous evaluation of the use of these tools in real virtual community environments. T...

As technology changes, so does the area of human-computer interaction. HCI education must continuously change to meet the new challenges to user interaction. The World Wide Web and other distributed networks, hand-held devices, and embedded computing all present new challenges for user-centered design methods, usability testing, and other forms of...

On September 11 we saw how a tightly knit group worked together to penetrate the US and carry out a carefully orchestrated attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. We also saw how citizens spontaneously organized themselves to care for victims and their families, and support each other. How can the CHI community build on its knowledge of comp...

Accomplished authors, Preece, Rogers and Sharp, have written a key new textbook on this core subject area. Interaction Design deals with a broad scope of issues, topics and paradigms that has traditionally been the scope of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design (ID). The book covers psychological and social aspects of users, inter...

This paper puts forth a vision and a possible architecture for a community knowledge evolution system. We propose augmenting a multimedia document repository (digital library) with innovative knowledge evolution support, including computer-mediated communications, community process support, decision support, advanced hypermedia features, and concep...

Demographic groups normally do not constitute communities. However they have the potential for becoming online communities when individuals share common interests, needs and goals for problem solving and support and when they can easily find and communicate with each other and establish relationships. People in these demographic groups may be highl...

Researchers take a broad range of approaches in studying social cyberspaces, and each approach has its own theoretical underpinnings, goals, methods, advantages, and disadvantages. We intend to bring researchers from various backgrounds together, document the range of variation in this interdisciplinary area, and build connections among these pract...

In email-based discussion lists (DLs), messages resident in archives, email clients and elsewhere are persistent. One way of examining persistent messages is through the eyes of lurkers. For participants in this study, persistent conversation is an inhibitor to participation, a mechanism for engendering participation, and something to be managed. P...

As online groups grow in number and type, understanding lurking is becoming increasingly important. Recent reports indicate that lurkers make up over 90% of online groups, yet little is known about them.This paper presents a demographic study of lurking in email-based discussion lists (DLs) with an emphasis on health and software-support DLs. Four...

When developing an information system, it is important to develop a system that can meet the needs of the users. Requirements gathering is traditionally performed through site visits or other face-to-face meetings. In the age of the Internet and World Wide Web, informational systems are being built for populations that are geographically distribute...

This joint Workshop was set up under the auspices of the Joint European Commission/National Science Foundation Strategy Group that had its first meeting in Budapest, 3-4 September 1998. The meeting derived from a joint collaboration agreement between the EC and NSF in August 1998, signed by Dr George Metakides (Director, Information Technologies, E...

The central tenet of HCI is to ensure that software and hardware design supports users doing their tasks. Most of the papers in this Special Issue go one step beyond designing for usability — they also address design issues related to supporting human values. As computer usage becomes more diverse both in terms of the range of users and types of ap...

The world wide web has increasingly been used to collect survey data. Web-based surveys may lower the time and costs required for doing survey research. Web-based surveys require thoughtful design and adherence to principles, much as with paper surveys. The purpose of this paper is to present guidelines for designing and implementing web-based surv...

Members of online support communities help each other by empathising about common problems and exchanging information about symptoms and treatments. Results from two studies indicate that: empathy occurs in most online textual communities; empathetic communication is influenced by the topic being discussed; the presence of women tends to encourage...

Lurkers are reported to make up a sizable proportion of many online communities, yet little is known about their reasons for lurking, who they are, and how they lurk. In this study, interviews with online community members provided a formative understanding of these and other issues. We discovered that lurking is a systematic and idiosyncratic proc...

As the user population of the Internet grows, more users are becoming involved in virtual communities. Some of these virtual communities are based on specific geographical communities or periodic face-to- face gatherings. In these communities, there are two components of the community: the virtual component and the physical component. In these hybr...

With the increasingly rapid uptake of the World Wide Web, even those pages classed as ‘the best of the web’ are not immune to large download latencies. This paper investigates whether the latency between requesting a page and receiving it influence user perceptions of the page. The paper describes a study in which users are presented with seven dif...

A synthesis of the literature suggests that the key characteristics for classifying online communities are: (i)their attributes, (ii) supporting software, (iii) their relationship to physical communities, and (iv) the sociological concept of boundedness. A classification schema based on these four characteristics is presented in this paper. Example...

The Center for People and Systems Interaction (CPSI) is a new research center based at South Bank University in London. An inter-disciplinary group is researching two key areas of Human-Computer Interaction: (i) the inter- relationships of psychological, social and technical factors in computer mediated communication (CMC) and (ii) extending the re...

orces determinesurvival, as companies and products come and go. Darwin wouldprobably have been astounded by the rapid expansion of multimediawithin only a few generations of computers. Predicting change ishard but we now know much about the strengths and limitations,likes and dislikes of humans interacting with computers.Principles can be drawn upo...

Users' questions can provide important design input. In this paper we examine the questions that users asked after viewing a series of seven video clips and then classify them into three main categories: questions relating to perception difficulties; questions concerning lack of understanding due to some form of dissonance and questions requiring m...

The rapid development of any field of knowledge brings with it unavoidable fragmentation and proliferation of new disciplines. The development of computer science is no exception. Software engineering (SE) and human-computer interaction (HCI) are both relatively new disciplines of computer science. Furthermore, as both names suggest, they each have...

This paper argues that good human-computer interaction is an essential part of the design of modern computer systems. Consequently, university computing courses must teach students the skills and knowledge necessary to recognise and design systems which are safe, easy and enjoyable to learn and to use, as well as fulfilling the necessary functional...

Many claims and much 'hype' surround the term 'hypermedia'. Foremost amongst these claims are that hypermedia will revolutionize learning and users' abilities to interact with, search for, and tailor information to suit their own needs. These claims are similar to those made about 'hypertext' in the past. Our point of view is that hypermedia is 'mo...