“In the moment they’re talking about it, you get a lot of learning for free because they might have to think about technical terminology,” says Kurt Squire, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied how games impact learning. “That’s a general finding in research in other fields, but it works in kind of a cool way in games.”
Read the full story at EdSurge
Safety advocates worry that drivers will cede responsibilities to the technology, effectively treating “driver support” technologies as “self-driving.”
“If that’s the attitude, then it’s only a matter of time until you get in an accident,” says Hillary Abraham, a doctoral student at University of California, Irvine, who studies vehicle safety.
Read the full story at Marketplace.
“When you encounter groups that you find to be in violation of platform policy or that are very toxic, it is useful for you to report them,” Kat Lo, an online community researcher at the University of California Irvine, told me in an email. “There is an uncomfortable relationship if you’re trusting that companies are just trawling and reading everybody’s social interactions, so a lot of them try to make it report-based.”
Read the full story at Motherboard.
Online publishing platforms and digital media can provide opportunities for nonmainstream groups to push back against and offer alternatives to the simplistic stereotypes presented in literature and popular culture. A study led by the University of California, Irvine focused on Harry Potter fan fiction and discovered that autistic people, family members, teachers and advocates cast autistic characters in their stories in diverse ways that challenge typical representations.
Read the full story at UCI News.
Scholars including James Paul Gee, Constance Steinkuehler and Kurt Squire have suggested that much of the pleasure we gain from playing video games is derived from the joy of learning. Such advocates of game-based learning argue that games are complex systems which players must work hard to understand. They must communicate with one another if they are to coordinate their strategies in multiplayer games, exercise critical thinking to solve puzzles, and adapt to the ever-changing circumstances that games present.
Read the full story at The Guardian.
University of California-Irvine is the No. 1 team in the inaugural Top 25 College League of Legends Coaches Poll.
The Top 25, which was released Wednesday, is the first poll of its kind in college esports. ESPN gathered responses from a group of more than 40 college coaches in the U.S. and Canada to craft the rankings, which will be updated every other week. League of Legends developer Riot Games assisted in identifying seasoned coaches in the College League of Legends scene and provided data to help inform the preseason rankings for those coaches.
Read the full story at ESPN.
“If a person has a habit of smoking, and they’re away from their cigarettes for a while, it creates tension,” says Gloria Mark, who led that 2012 study about email and who’s an informatics professor at the University of California, Irvine. Depending on your job, eliminating (or even significantly reducing) tech may also be totally unrealistic. But Mark thinks organizations also have a responsibility to ensure employees don’t become tech slaves.
Read the full story at the BBC.
Fresh into the new year, I’m delighted to announce the publication of Affinity Online: How Connection and Shared Interest Fuel Learning, a book synthesizing research by the Leveling Up team of the Connected Learning Research Network. This book follows in the footsteps of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (HOMAGO) published a decade earlier.
Read the full story at Connected Learning Alliance.
One in three users of the internet is younger than 18, yet cyberspace isn’t geared toward them. That’s why the Connected Learning Lab in the California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology at UC Irvine hopes to better understand how young people are using digital technology. … Cultural anthropologist and informatics professor-in-residence Mimi Ito directs the lab. … According to Candice Odgers, a UC Irvine professor of psychological science who studies adolescents’ mental health and development, many adolescents are actually thriving in the digital age.
Read the full story at Hispanic Engineer & Information Technology.
If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you find yourself struggling with distractions on a regular basis. Whether it’s an email notification, a meeting or a new emergency to deal with, every distraction can potentially pull you away from whatever project you’re working on. And that’s not good because, according to Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, “Once thrown off track, it can take some 23 minutes for a worker to return to the original task.” So, why are entrepreneurs so susceptible to distraction and what steps can they – and you – take to fight back against this vulnerability?
Read the full story at Entrepreneur.