Category Archives: Articles

It’s rare to have the opportunity to work with a stable team of extraordinary scholars over the course of a decade. It’s even rarer for this group of scholars to span a wide range of disciplines and approaches, while sharing common concerns in research, educational practice, and social change. A long time in the making, we are at last releasing our final collaborative report, The Connected Learning Research Network: Reflections on a Decade of Engaged Scholarship, from the MacArthur Foundation Connected Learning Research Network, that grew out of a decade of the network’s work together.

Read the full story at Connected Learning Alliance.

Kylie Peppler sits down with Dean Richard Arum to share her views on connected learning, the intersection of new technology and the arts, and maker culture.

Watch the interview on YouTube or embedded below.

Our devices are constant sources of distraction and context shifting. A study spearheaded by Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine found that it takes more than 20 minutes to recover from a distraction and return to the original task.

Read the full story at Inc.

Jazette Johnson, a recipient of the fellowship who is a PhD student at University of California, Irvine, is hoping to improve the mental, emotional, and social health of people with dementia. Johnson’s research seeks to understand how to better support people with dementia and their caregivers through the design of virtual support technologies. “This fellowship will not only ease the financial burden that sometimes comes with being in graduate schools, but it will also give me the opportunity to solely focus on the research that has interested me for years,” Johnson says.

Read the full story at the Microsoft Research Blog.

“Screen time is a popular carry-over measure from the context of a TV-centered era, developed around health and parenting concerns,” says Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist who studies technology use at the University of California. Even the American Association of Pediatrics, which first popularized the term, has moved away from screen time as a core measure, she says.

Read the full story at MIT Technology Review.

I will never forget the excitement of attending the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC), the largest gathering of women in computing, for the first time in 2014. While I wasn’t sure what to expect, I never anticipated the energy and inspiration I felt, nor the influence that GHC would have on me lasting far beyond those incredible days at the conference.

Read the full story at Medium.

A new study out of the University of California set out to find whether people responded differently to the presence or absence of political hashtags in news stories in major publications.

Study co-author Eugenia Ha Rim Rho explained to Jim Mora that hashtags were first popularised by Twitter in 2009 and have become widespread ever since.

Read the story and listen to the interview at Radio New Zealand.

Depending on just how deep you want to go, many options are available. There are masters and bachelor’s degrees in digital design, HCI and, as of late, even UX that you can go for if you don’t mind spending time and money. Some of the more affordable and flexible online university programmes available include UC Irvine’s Master of human-computer interaction & design, which lasts one year and costs $49.500.

Read the full story at Creative Bloq.

In my work as a productivity trainer and speaker for nearly 2,000 organizations, I have found that distraction is the single biggest barrier to meaningful, satisfying work. Studies by Gloria Mark and colleagues show that we often switch what we’re doing every few minutes, and these frequent interruptions “cause us to work faster, which causes more stress, higher frustration, time pressure, and effort.” And this sabotages not just our performance but the way we “show up” in the world.

Read the full story at Harvard Business Review.

Inserting adults and teachers into video game culture helps teach students how to be better citizens online, said Constance Steinkuehler, who studies links between video games and learning at UC Irvine’s Department of Informatics. A lack of oversight and mentorship in online spaces has led to “a real erosion of basic respectfulness for ourselves and others online,” she said. Esports in schools can help reverse that, she said.

Read the full story at The San Diego Union-Tribune.