Dr. Beth Kolko is an Associate Professor in the Department of Technical Communication at the University of Washington. She was previously a professor of English at the University of Wyoming and the University of Texas at Arlington with a specialty in rhetoric.
She has been active in the technology and communication areas for nearly two decades. Her work in the early 1990s focused on rhetorical theory and cultural studies with an emphasis on writing as a social act. Studying writers in informal educational settings, both offline and online, sparked her interest in the Internet (which was then text-based) as a writing environment. As the development of new Internet technologies resulted in changes to the kind content online, her research shifted from considering texts to multimedia. Her work on virtual communities at that point began to include visual representations of users in online environments and issues related to community fragmentation online. That work was tied to her long-term interests in how identity and diversity impact people’s use of technology. Her chapter “Erasing @race: Going White in the (Inter)Face” in her co-edited volume Race and Cyberspace framed the argument about diversity and technology in terms of interface design and assumptions about users. She is also the editor of Virtual Publics (Columbia UP, 2003), co-author of Writing in an Electronic World (Longman, 2001), and the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters.
Her current research further develops the idea of diversity and technology by focusing on information and communications technologies in developing countries in order to counteract what could be called a failure of imagination in terms of how devices, software, and services are designed. The possible benefit of ICTs across domains has been documented, but much of the technology currently available does not consider the infrastructure and regulatory challenges of most usage environments, or the multi-lingual, low-literacy, and other elements of users’ context. To that end, her current research project is focused on Design for Digital Inclusion (DDI), which applies theory-based analyses of culture and technology in order to examine how technology is used in diverse settings. One goal of this project is to demonstrate how technologists, social scientists, and humanities scholars can collaborate on technology-related development and implementation projects.
As part of the DDI work, she is currently PI on a National Science Foundation grant examining the impact of ICTs in Central Asia. This five-year, $1.23 million grant uses quantitative and ethnographic research methods to examine how cultural patterns affect ICT adoption and adaptation; the findings from this project will inform design efforts to think more broadly about how to create devices and services to better meet the needs of users.
She also runs the Digital Games Research Group at UW.
Kolko also consults with a variety of international organizations on issues related to information and communication technology adoption and usage patterns throughout the developing world. She has consulted for projects in Afghanistan, Cambodia, and India related to how rural and urban populations make use of ICTs, from community radio to Internet.