WHAT IS YOUR ROLE IN THE CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN DIGITAL EDUCATION?
I’m a Lecturer in Children and Technology and a member of the Children and Technology research group, with a background in Human-Computer Interaction, Psychology and Business. I’ll be co-teaching the Children and Technology course with Andrew Manches, and together we will be exploring how to grow the Centre’s presence around the topic of Children, Interaction and Design. In particular, I’m interested in exploring avenues for participatory research on the co-design of technologies with children and how this fits within a wider context of education and interaction.
HOW DO YOU SEE DIGITAL EDUCATION AND WHY DO YOU THINK IT’S IMPORTANT?
Digital education is essential. I’m particularly interested in speculative and creative approaches to imagining technological futures and I feel that digital education has a key role to play in this. I’m delighted to be part of the Centre for Research in Digital Education and to learn from colleagues in this area.
WHAT PIECE OF WORK ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF (TO DATE)?
I was extremely fortunate to work with minimally-verbal children at an autism-specific primary school in Australia over the course of four years, during my PhD. It struck me that there was very little research around supporting children on the spectrum who don’t communicate verbally to be included in the design process of the technologies which would ultimately go on to pervade their lives. So, colleagues and I got to work on developing new methods to explicitly support minimally-verbal children in the design process, through creative co-design and participatory design approaches. The outcome was a method named ‘Co-Design Beyond Words’, which integrated existing evidence-based speech and language therapy approaches with established co-design approaches from the field of Human-Computer Interaction. I’d love to continue working on these and similar methods.
IF YOU HAD A TIME MACHINE FOR A DAY WHEN WOULD YOU VISIT AND WHY?
I’d shoot straight for the distant future! I’d like to know if the things we speculate about technology being about to facilitate in 1000 years’ time will have any bearing when (if?!) that time comes.