A case study in the teaching of HCI

This poster describes a "real world" example of the teaching of Human-Computer Interaction at the final level of a Computer Science degree. It highlights many of the problems of the ever expanding HCI domain and the consequential issues of what to teach and why. The poster describes the conception and development of a new HCI course, its historical background, the justification for decisions made, lessons learnt from its implementation, and questions arising from its implementation that are yet to be addressed. For example, should HCI be taught as a course in its own right or as a component of another course? At what level is the teaching of HCI appropriate, and how is teaching influenced by industry? It considers suitable learning pedagogies as well as the demands and the contribution of industry. The experiences presented will no doubt be familiar to many HCI educators. Whilst the poster raises more questions than it answers, the resolution of some questions will hopefully be achieved by the workshop.

A survey of teaching and assessment methods employed in UK higher education programmes for HCI course

A survey of teaching and assessment methods employed in UK Higher Education programmes for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) courses was conducted in April 2003. The findings from this survey are presented, and conclusions drawn.

Postcolonial futures: postcolonial literature and the Obama moment

In an analysis of President Obama's Acceptance Speech, this article argues that postcolonial theory is now being re-formulated for a global, transnational sensibility.

Postcolonial futures: postcolonial literature and the Obama moment

Since the late 1970s the western academy has encouraged the development of postcolonial literary theory and the formulation of a postcolonial literary canon existing outside the prescriptive narratives of the ‘mother’ country and empire. Having lost faith in the binary oppositions underpinning such narratives, we turned to alternative fictions that contested the construction of the ‘other’, the world divided between the ‘West and the Rest’. The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 marked the beginning of the discipline now known as postcolonial studies with its new ways of understanding ‘the west’s’ relationship with ‘the east’ and, by extension, all the former colonies of empire. Despite these radical origins, however, postcolonialism’s more recent emphasis on the psychological and its affirmation of the hybrid text and self has, for many, served to obscure real economic social realities that have very little to do with the magical or wondrous textual expression of a postcolonial identity. This paper considers problems associated with defining the postcolonial and proposes that, in a literary context, we broaden its meaning to include texts traditionally outside the category of postcolonial literature. To extend the meaning of postcolonial is timely as we are now witnessing its relocation from ‘margin’ to ‘centre’ with the election of Barack Obama. This moment may be seen as a disruption of conventional understandings of what constitutes postcolonial literature, essentially as oppositional discourse that could only define itself as peripheral to, or ‘post’, metropolitan and economic concerns. [From the Author]

Literature and the shaman: Jung, trauma stories and new origin stories in The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

The paper first considers the role of Jungian ideas in relation to academic disciplines and to literary studies in particular. Jung is a significant resource in negotiating developments in literary theory because of his characteristic treatment of the ‘other’. The paper then looks at The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by C.S. Lewis whose own construction of archetypes is very close to Jung’s. By drawing upon new post-Jungian work from Jerome Bernstein’s Living in the Borderland (2005), the novel is revealed to be intimately concerned with narratives of trauma and of origin. Indeed, a Jungian and post-Jungian approach is able to situate the text both within nature and in the historical traumas of war as well as the personal traumas of subjectivity. Where Bernstein connects his work to the postcolonial ethos of the modern Navajo shaman, this new weaving of literary and cultural theory points to the residue of shamanism within the arts of the West. [From the Publisher]