Scholarship
Scholarly Publications
Of my 110 publications in Enlighten, 30 are publications relating to education, with citation figures of 135, 91, 83 and 77 (as at July 2018) for the four most highly-cited. Most of these relate to the use of technology in education, in particular as a means for developing transferrable skills.
Concurrent with, and based on, my HCI research publications, I have developed a set of scholarly publications that demonstrate research challenges, frankly discussing problems and limitations in experimental design. Such articles are primarily intended to contribute to the development of the research skills of Early Career Researchers and PhD students.
Eight research publications resulted from a research-focused approach to Honours projects supervision (Samra, Hoggan, Worrill, Ryan, Allder, Pilcher, Naumann). One research publication ("A Classification of Infographics") is the result of the joint endeavours of all the members of an undergraduate class I taught at the University of Arizona in 2017.
Experimental Human Computer Interaction, Cambridge University Press, 2012
My book is the culmination of over 15 years of extensive and broad research in empirical studies in the area of Information visualisation. As a pioneer of this research area, this book is a distillation of all I have learned (including challenges and mistakes as well as successes); its primary aim is to provide practical guidance to Honours and PhD students in devising and conducting their own empirical studies.
Unsolicited comments about the book include
- “I only took receipt of your book this Friday and already it is informing the empirical aspect of our work” (PhD student, Brighton)
- "Thank you very much Helen for providing us and the broader HCI community with this wonderful educational resource” (academic, University of Illinois).
Current Scholarship Projects
Enabling peer review: Aropä is an online peer-review system designed, developed and maintained by myself and Dr John Hamer which has been successfully used over a wide variety of subjects since 2009. With some initial funding from the UK Higher Education Academy, The University of Auckland, and the University of Glasgow, we have supported over 1600 successful peer-review assignments in 33 institutions in 13 different countries.
Contributing Student Pedagogies: This ongoing broad project investigates the benefits of educational methods that encourage students to contribute to the learning of others and to value the contributions made by other students. We have written an extensive survey of the variety of CSPs used in Computing Science Higher Education, as well as a substantial report on the technologies that support such educational methods.
Previous Scholarship Projects
Students creating multiple choice questions: Peerwise is a system developed at the University of Auckland by Paul Denny, which is now used in several institutions worldwide. I have worked on projects with Paul, John Hamer and Andrew-Luxton Reilly to investigate the benefits of PeerWise use on student learning and engagement, and with Amanda Sykes on how PeerWise leads to useful controversary between students.
Crowdsourcing methodology: I co-edited a book on using Crowdsourcing techniques for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) empirical studies (Springer, 2017). The book is primarily intended as guidance for PhD students and ECRs who wish to use this powerful and novel data collection approach – an approach that it is unlikely their PhD supervisors would have used extensively in the past.
International activity: In 2014, I was awarded funding from the University Staff Mobility Programme to visit Lund University for two weeks to investigate the activities of their Academic Development Unit, and the responses of academics to a ‘scholarship’ approach to L&T development courses.
Scholarship Working Groups: I participated in three working groups at the Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education conference:
- Research methods in computing: what are they, and how should we teach them? I proposed an iterative four-phase model of goal-driven enquiry that formed the basis of our research teaching framework. (2006)
- Contributing Student Pedagogies. This group defined the range of pedagogies that could be considered as ‘contributory’, relating them to constructivist and community theories of learning. (2008)
- Tools for "contributing student learning" (co-leader). This group surveyed, compared and discussed tools being used to support collaborative activities in Computing Science education. (2010)
The Share Project: ('To see ourselves as others see us: sharing and representing disciplinary classroom practice', www.sharingpractice.ac.uk) In 2011, I took part the Share Project Survey, which entailed writing (and sharing) a diary entry one day a month for a year. The aim of these diaries is to learn more about the lives, beliefs, conditions of work, important issues and habits of 'the everyday academic' and to examine disciplinary teaching practice and its relationship to student achievement.
HCI Disciplinary Commons: I was a member of the HCI Disciplinary Commons led by Professor Sally Fincher and Professor Janet Finlay in 2008; as part of this project I have produced a teaching portfolio for my HCI teaching, as well as a retrospective video.