Rhonda McEwen

Rhonda McEwen is a Professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and at Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. 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. McEwen’s research was the covered by the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes in 2012 and 2013. Her publications appear in the journals Information, Communication & Society, Computers and Education, Learning & Instruction, New Media and Society, and Library and Information Science Research.

Professor McEwen’s research focuses on the communicative interactions that arise when users engage with new media technologies. The implications of these interactions are social in nature and result in peer-to-peer or networked communicative practices; in other cases, there are implications for the manner in which user’s process information with consequences for learning and technology design; and there are cases when there are both social and cognitive effects. While at the University of Toronto Mississauga she pursued the study of mobile media and cognitive informatics through two trajectories, including theoretical inquiries into the cognitive effects of using touch-input devices in educational environments, corresponding to a learning science sub-specialism in cognitive informatics that focuses on information processing and communications technology design; and in analyses of the social consequences of everyday information practices and of engagement with new media, with a focus on expanding the core concept of information practice within the fields of communication and information studies.