Speaker to Address Retaining Human Values in Computer Age

Ben Shneiderman, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland, College Park, will discuss his philosophy of teaching and learning for the cyber generation on Friday, April 9, at 4:00 p.m. in Textor 101. Titled "Relate-Create-Donate: Human Values for Shaping Educational Technology," his talk is free and open to the public.

A professor in the Department of Computer Science and member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Systems Research at the University of Maryland, Shneiderman speaks regularly on the topics of human values and the future of technology, applying educational technology for the "post-TV generation," user interface design, and information visualization. He is speaking at Ithaca under the auspices of a $500,000 grant awarded to the College in 1998 by the W. M. Keck Foundation, intended to integrate the use of advanced technology and multimedia capabilities into the humanities curriculum.

"The post-TV media of computers and communications — including the World Wide Web, hypermedia CD-ROMs, electronic mail, list servers, word processing, graphics, animation, and sound tools — enable teachers, students, and parents to creatively re-engineer education," says Shneiderman. "But it is not enough to teach children to surf the Net — we must also teach them how to make waves. Students should be given the experience of engaging with each other in team projects, preferably situated in the world outside the classroom, with the goal of constructing a product that is useful or interesting to someone other than the teacher. This relate-create-donate philosophy emphasizes authentic, service-oriented collaborations that produce intense motivation and positive educational experiences."

Shneiderman is the author of Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems and Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction. His 1989 book coauthored with Greg Kearsley, Hypertext Hands-On!, was the world’s first commercial electronic book and pioneered the highlighted embedded link. He edited the 1993 book Sparks of Innovation in Human-Computer Interaction, which collects 25 papers from 10 years of research at the University of Maryland. The collection includes Shneiderman’s seminal paper on direct manipulation, a term he coined in 1981 to describe the visual presentation of objects and actions combined with pointing techniques, designed to accomplish rapid incremental and reversible operations.

Shneiderman has been on the editorial advisory boards of nine journals and has consulted and lectured for many organizations, including Apple, AT&T, Citicorp, GE, Honeywell, IBM, Intel, Library of Congress, Microsoft, and NASA. He holds an earned doctorate from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and an honorary degree from the University of Guelph, in Ontario. He was elected as a fellow of the Association for Computing in 1997.