Some usability references from a course on interactive system design

I'm just about to start teaching a course that I teach at the University of Manchester each year (alas for the last time this year due to various internal factors). It's a course on participatory interactive system design that uses a largely experential learning approach.

Each year we choose an interactive system to design, and mostly run the course as a design exercise dealing with all the contingencies of real world design. This year I've made the choice, we are going to be exploring an educational/community support system. More about this later.

There are some other activities to accompany the experiential learning component, and this year, as part of some pre-course warm exercises, I asked the students to bookmark references that they found pertaining to usability.

Today I looked at the result, about three hundred bookmarks in del.icio.us. From about 36 students. Weyhey! Go students go!

I'm of course making some last minute preparations, so no time to talk more about the course. But I will return to it in future posts, under the tags appearing below. (One of these days I must get my tags into the sidebar here, maybe this will be impetus...)