RICK KOPAK CONTACT ME - Key Persons

Aaron Loehrlein

Job Titles:
  • Assistant Professor at SLAIS

Edie Rasmussen

Job Titles:
  • Professor at SLAIS

Heather O'Brien

Job Titles:
  • Assistant Professor at SLAIS
Heather O'Brien is an Assistant Professor at SLAIS who is invested in exploring, understanding, and evaluating the user's experience with technology. Heather's dissertation work (Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, 2008) addressed the concept of ‘engagement,' a term as a desired outcome of interactions with technology, but defined in many ways within various communities. The doctoral research pooled these different interpretations and characteristics of engagement into a conceptual model that was rooted in Flow, Aesthetic, and Play Theories. The model was shaped further by an interview and two large-scale survey studies to articulate how users describe their engagement with technologies and to develop and evaluate a 31-item scale to measure engagement. Heather is continuing her study of engagement by looking at ways to corroborate behavioural and self-report data, and at using her findings on engagement to date to inform design. Other areas of inquiry include: exploring engagement in applications, such as qualitative software, open-source journal system (OJS, with DIIG), and educational technologies, and in community spaces, e.g. libraries; examining engagement in the scholarly research process; and studying the roles of affect and touch in creating engaging interfaces.

Luanne Freund

Job Titles:
  • Assistant Professor at SLAIS
Luanne Freund is an Assistant Professor at SLAIS with an abiding interest in people, how they relate to one another, and how those relationships are mediated, faciliated and sustained through digital information.The major contribution of Luanne's dissertation (2008) was the identification of a relationship between the tasks that motivate information searching and the digital document genres used in the workplace. Current research in the digital government domain seeks to extent this understanding of the role of tasks and genres in information seeking and use, and apply it to the development of contextual information retrieval systems. More details are available here (http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/lfreund/).