Category Archives: Articles

Professor Gloria Mark knows all about distraction. In 2015, working with her team at the Department of Informatics, based in the Uni of California, Mark studied how often our focus is compromised. Subjects were observed over three dozen offices, their working days vulnerable to phones or colleagues, emails or rival chores.

The study was a sequel to Mark’s matching study in 2000, where the average attention span had been 12 seconds. This time round? Try eight seconds, roughly the duration of a goldfish, minus the benefit of a sunken castle.

Read the full story at The Sydney Morning Herald.

GeekEd #2: Shall We Play a Game?:
A panel of game scholars discuss how building better games, identifying the biases within them, and the act of “play” helps people empathize with others and provides them with a guideline for this work on college campuses. This panel of scholars will explore the intersection of games, learning and inclusivity in the context of curriculum development, activism, policy, history and game design. Panelists include Constance Steinkuehler (UC Irvine; Senior Policy Analyst, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy 2011-2012), Bonnie Ruberg (UC Irvine), Kurt Squire (UC Irvine), Amanda Cullen (UC Irvine) and Aaron Trammell (UC Irvine).

Read the article at KPBS.

All of these adventures are video-enabled, thanks to a handful of sophisticated educational games designed for college classrooms. Used in conjunction with a textbook and traditional lectures, the games are “like a lab experience,” said Kurt Squire, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who helped design the astronomy video game At Play in the Cosmos when he was with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Read the full story at Inside Higher Ed.

Parents fret about their kids spending too much time with digital devices, but many don’t realize that their efforts to limit screen time can backfire. Experts have reversed earlier guidelines about screen time, and recent research suggests that strict time-based rules can be harmful.

Read the full story at PopSugar.

California-based Connected Camps is part of a growing offering of online camps that fill a unique niche to complement their traditional pine-and-mortar counterparts. Accessible across the U.S. and around the world, the camp offers programs in engineering, architecture, coding, animation, game design and storytelling, all hosted on custom Minecraft servers or delivered with MIT’s Scratch coding software. Each weeklong program connects kids with fellow campers and expert mentors who support the participants and share their expertise.

“We meet kids where they are, where they’re already engaged with social and interest-driven learning,” said Mimi Ito, a co-founder of Connected Camps and a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on how young people engage with digital media. “If you’re already messing around with redstone in Minecraft, this is a pathway for you to learn circuitry and get interested in engineering.”

Read the full story at KQED News.

If you are constantly checking your Facebook on your phone or browser, then there’s one thing you need to know: You’re not getting enough sleep, according to a recent research done at the University of California. Professor Gloria Mark, who led the study, asked students to fill out a sleep survey; activity was monitored on their phones and computers—logging when they switched from one window to another, texted or made a phone call.

“There have been lots of studies on how information technology affects sleep,” Mark was quoted in an article published by The Independent. “We did the opposite: We looked at how sleep duration influences IT [iformation technology] usage.”

Read the full story at BusinessMirror.

New UCI informatics professors Constance Steinkuehler and Kurt Squire, internationally recognized educational gaming experts, believe they’re at the right place at the right time, when their field is experiencing a “golden age.”
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Gloria Mark is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at University of California Irvine. Gloria talks about her experiences as chair of a major conference, not just the work but also the rewards. She talks about how she moved from a Fine Arts background, painting murals on buildings, to a PhD in cognitive science and now studying the relationship between media use, attention and stress, but still being able to be creative in work. She also reflects honestly on her own struggles to manage her screen time and stress but above all she reminds us of the importance of fun and fulfillment in work.

Listen to the interview at Changing Academic Life.

“I think it’s really critically important to have metrics for transparency about whether a city is approaching its diversity goals,” says Mizuko Ito, director of the University of California, Irvine’s Connected Learning Lab and research director of the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub. “There are so many case studies of well-meaning public policies that were launched with very good intentions, but that resulted in no, or even negative outcomes around inclusivity. It’s something that’s really hard to get right, because it’s not simply about getting butts in seats. It really is about fostering a change in culture, practices, and expectations.”

Read the full story at CityLab.

Two telepresence robots roll into a human-computer interaction conference. Sounds like the beginning of a very nerdy joke, but it really happened (#2017). A few weeks ago in Denver, Colorado, a robot I was piloting over the internet from my computer in Idaho stood wheel-to-wheel with a similar ‘bot in a pink skirt controlled by a researcher in Germany. We huddled. We introduced ourselves by yelling at each other’s screens. Given the topic of the conference, this particular human-computer interaction was a little too on the HD touch-screen nose. But as much as the huddle symbolized of the future, it was also a political statement about a troubled present.

“It is a political statement, right? That we can allow people to come,” says Gloria Mark, General Chair of CHI and a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She says that even with the telepresence robots reserved for people wth denied visas, the conference still lost some attendees over the looming ban. “They just didn’t even want to take a chance of coming,” she said.

Read the full story at Wired.