HCI Education - people and stories, diversity and intolerance

Hi This is my first column as Education Editor for SIGCHI Bulletin. When, many months ago, Andrew Sears first asked me whether I would takeover this job, it seemed a long time until I'd need to do my first column. As always, the time has flown (reminding me of Jean Gasen's handover column to Andrew in 1996) and it is now the moment to pull various circulating ideas down onto paper (or at least pixels). Why so difficult, surely there are plenty of major topics in HCI education? Well, the difficulty I find is in drawing a line between HCI education, HCI research and HCI practice. The more I think of this problem, the more it seems to say something fundamental about the nature of HCI as a discipline. But, in order to keep this issue's column from travelling to far along on that path, let's just not worry too much about this distinction for now.