User:Rhonda.mcewen

I'm Rhonda McEwen and I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga where I teach and conduct research on New Media. I spend most of my time at the Institute of Communication, Culture and Information Technology at UTM where I work with bright undergraduates, and I work with stellar graduate students at the iSchool (Faculty of Information) on the St. George campus. My research and teaching centre around information practices involving new media technologies. I actively engage with questions on how we use, seek, share, and create information by using devices to talk, text, tweet, collect images, message via Facebook, LinkedIn, and other IM, at work and play. I also examine the ways that we perform identities in both 'real' and virtual worlds through avatars; how we integrate location awareness in our interactions; and I consider the consequences of the uses of technologies on our communication, sociality, and humanity.

In exploring these topics I focus on a few areas more specifically - I research augmentative communications technologies for people with neuro-diverse development such as Autism; youth media practices; network analysis; and social media design. From a technical perspective I have a graduate degree in telecommunications engineering, and I have worked in the digital communications industry for 15 years, both in companies providing services and in management consulting to those companies. I have found that experience and knowledge in both the social and technical aspects of media technologies allow me to bring a nuanced perspective to understanding these issues in my research, and in discussing these topics with students.

Currently I am excited about my research on the use of iPod and iPad devices by non-verbal Autistic children for communication and sociality, in two Toronto school settings. For more details, have a look at my research page.

Thanks for stopping by. Check out my blog called "Wheel an come again: sociotechnical musings with my public" at http://rnmcewen.blogspot.com/