Jenny Preece

Jenny Preece is a professor and dean of the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland (USA). Prior to joining the University of Maryland in 2005, Preece was a professor and department chair of information systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore Count (UMBC). Before coming to the U.S. in 1996, Preece was a research professor at South Bank University, London, for two years, where she created and directed an interdisciplinary center for people and systems interaction. In the mid-1980s, Preece joined the Open University (OU) where she was an associate professor. At the Open University she worked on a variety of projects in computer-based education, human computer interaction, and computer education. With a team of academics from the UK and Holland, Preece assisted in developing the first master’s distance learning course on human computer interaction, which was regularly studied by around 1,000 students. This experience provided the foundation for authoring one of the first major texts in HCI—human computer interaction (Preece, Rogers, Sharp, Benyon, Holland, & Carey, 1994)—and initiated the successful authoring partnership between Helen, Yvonne, and Jenny. Preece’s teaching and research interests include online communities of interest, communities of practice, social computing, and human computer interaction. She was one of the first researchers to point out the importance of online communities for providing social and emotional support to their members as well as for obtaining and exchanging information, particularly in patient support communities. She has also researched the differences in participants’ behavior in different types of online communities including the reasons why people do or not participate. Preece has written extensively on these topics. Her work includes a book titled Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability (Preece, 2000).

Publications

An Event-Driven Community in Washington, DC: Forces That Influence Participation
An Event-Driven Community in Washington, DC: Forces That Influence Participation
Jenny Preece. © 2009. 10 pages.
This chapter describes a small networked community in which residents of an apartment building in Washington, D.C., USA supplement their face-to-face social interactions with a...
Foreword
Foreword
Jenny Preece. © 2007. 2 pages.
This Foreword is included in the book Enhancing Learning Through Human Computer Interaction.