Summer School for IT Lecturer

School of Information Technology Lecturer, Sophie McKenzie, recently attended the Australian National University/University of South Australia Human Computer Interaction Summer School (HCISS), held in Canberra on 5 to 9 December 2011.

After an initial invitation from ANU was extended to students and staff at Deakin, Sophie and several students from the School of Information Technology were selected to attend the program.

This Summer School comprised a crash course in Research Methods in Human Computer Interaction, and featured guest lecturers and hands-on experimentation through laboratory exercises.

Special sessions on frontier technology for user interaction were also held, with topics covering free-space gesture interaction, field-work and ethnography, and eye-gaze and EEG (electroencephalography).

Sophie said the highlights of the Summer School were the lectures by Professor Bruce Thomas (UniSA) about Augmented Reality, and Dr Duncan Stevenson (ANU) on Field-work in Computing. She also enjoyed networking with colleagues and students from the other institutions, venturing around the ANU campus, and the night time activities at the student residences (which included games of downball).