Rhonda N. McEwen

Programs: CCIT and DEM; Graduate Appointment at Faculty of Information
Specialization: Social/New media; network analysis; mobile communication; information practices

Rhonda McEwen is Professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and at University of Toronto iSchool. She holds an MBA in Information Technology from City University in London, England, an MSc in Telecommunications from the University of Colorado, and a PhD in Information from University of Toronto. Professor McEwen has worked with and researched in digital communication media for 15 years, both for companies providing services and in management consulting to those companies. Her research and teaching centre around information practices involving new media technologies, with an emphasis on mobile and tablet communication, new media, social networks, and sensory information processing. McEwen’s research was covered by the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes in 2012 and 2013. Her recent publications appear in the journals Information, Communication & Society, Computers and Education, Learning & Instruction, New Media and Society, and Library and Information Science Research.
Blog: http://rnmcewen.blogspot.com/

Research
As a Canada Research Chair, Dr. Rhonda McEwen is building on her theory of user-device interaction that defines the exchange between technologies and users as a unique form of communication. McEwen is investigating eye-gaze systems, wearable devices, and Virtual Reality headsets to analyze the relationships between visual perception (i.e. ophthalmoception) and touch perception (i.e. tactioception). This research program is organized as three related projects: 1. Eye-gaze and haptics as multimodal communication – studying Retts Syndrome; 2. Technical and cognitive characteristics of visual-haptic wearable devices; and 3.Virtual Reality and perception: the role of proprioception in cognition.