Communications of the ACM Cover Story for Former Grad and Faculty Member

If you are in the computer industry or in computer science education then you are familiar with the "Communications of the ACM". If you are not, it is a highly respected publication read world wide. Aside from the 90,000 members of the ACM who receive each issue, it is read by many more non-members as well.

Here is a snippet of how the publication describes itself:

Communications of the ACM is the leading print and online publication for the computing and information technology fields. Read by computing professionals worldwide, Communications is recognized as the most trusted and knowledgeable source of industry information for today’s computing professional.

So it is quite an accolade that former Institute of Technology Computing and Software Systems graduate student Kristen Shinohara and Institute Faculty member Josh Tenenberg landed the cover spot and are a featured article in the August edition. Kristen is now a Ph.D. Student in the Information School of the University of Washington, Seattle, WA.

Professor Josh Tenenberg has been teaching and conducting research at the Institute of Technology at the University of Washington, Tacoma, for many years. He has recently been interested in Computer Ethics, Social Informatics, Human-Computer Interaction Design, Commons Governance, and Computer Science Education. Just this last year he started an Industry Partners co-teaching program that brought one of Google's Human Interface Design experts into the classroom for a quarter to share the course.

The article comes from the capstone project that Kristen was working on to complete her degree with the support and sponsorship of Josh, who was the faculty Chair. The focus was on a blind person's interaction with technology and is described nicely by the publication as follows:

One of the most effective methods for designing technologies for blind users is to observe how they interact with tools that are part of their daily lives, say Kristen Shinohara and Josh Tenenberg in this month's cover story (see page 58). The findings illustrate how elements of meaning can be as important as usability in the design of technology. In fact, their article inspired this month's cover image – a Braille representation of a quote by Helen Keller: "It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision."

If you would like to read the article, here is a link to it online, as well as a link to the entire publication.

A Blind Person's Interaction with Technology

Communications of the ACM

Congratulations to the both of them.

BarCamp Tacoma, Be There and Change the World

In August of 2005, Tim O’Reilly, technology publisher extraordinaire invited 250 of his friends to join him for a day of activities that would allow them to get to know each other better and to “hopefully come up with some cool ideas about how to change the world.” The idea was to have people who are doing interesting work share it with others. Interesting in this case meaning the topics of web services, data visualization, opening source programming and data security among other things.

This had been going on for about three years by 2005, and was a pretty exclusive event. Those that were not invited, but were also doing interesting things decided that they could organize a similar opportunity, make it open to anyone interested in explaining why they were interesting and garner enough interest in the event to fill it. It was a success and in answer to the O’Rielly event, named “FooCamp”, it became known as “BarCamp” in a gesture toward its tech geek roots. It is also known as an “unconference” because it shapes itself on the day of the event and speakers present in half hour slots on a first come/first served basis. Chris Messina’s idea was an unqualified success and the occasion for BarCamps has increased in number and venues.

If you were interested and had heard of BarCamp over the last few years, it would likely to have been one somewhere in Seattle or on the East Side.

That was until this August 8th at the Suite 133 offices. Thanks to Scott Kuehn, Michael Maitlen, Jennifer Halveron Kuehn and Robert Peaslee an open invitation to participate and interact is available to the Tacoma set. You DO NOT have to be a tech geek to participate. Perhaps your interest is in marketing or art or economic development. If you are willing to speak, you are welcome to the event.

Open at 9:00am with presentations starting at 10:00am, the event will go until 5:00pm. Coffee is your friend. Perhaps we will all get to know each other better and come up with some cool ideas to change the world, the state, the county, or maybe Tacoma.

For more information check out www.barcamptacoma.org and sign up there.