Category Archives: Articles

Informatics Professor Paul Dourish was recently featured on the Danish technology radio show Harddisken (hard disk) about hackerspaces—community-operated workspaces where people with common interests, often in computers, machining, technology, science, digital art or electronic art, can meet, socialize and collaborate—in China.
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Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a founder of Connected Camps, an online program where kids play Minecraft together, has closely studied gamers and learning. Ito points out that when kids delve into this hackerlike side of the game — concocting redstone devices or creating command blocks — they often wind up consulting discussion forums online, where they get advice from adult Minecraft players. These folks are often full-time programmers who love the game, and so younger kids and teenagers wind up in conversation with professionals.

Read the full story on the The New York Times Magazine site.

Both research scientist Mimi Ito and Informatics professor Geoffrey Bowker have recently released books that delve deeply into the sociocultural aspects of today’s technical age.

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Informatics Professor Paul Dourish was featured as a guest on a March 2016 episode of Up Close, the research talk show from the University of Melbourne, Australia. The topic of his interview—“The social life of algorithms: Shaping, and being shaped by, our world”—explains how algorithms, as more than mere technical objects, guide our social lives and organization, and are themselves evolving products of human social actions. The interview was conducted by Andi Horvath and is now available on iTunes, Stitcher and TuneIn. You can also find the full interview and its transcription on the Up Close website or listen to the stream below.
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An Informatics team, including Assistant Project Scientist Kathleen H. Pine, Associate Professor Melissa Mazmanian and graduate student Chris Wolf, has been nominated for the iSchools Lee Dirks Award for Best Paper. Their paper, “The Work of Reuse: Birth Certificate Data and Healthcare Accountability Measurements,” assesses the key information science concept of data reuse in the practice of recording birth certificate data. It documents an ethnographic study of ways to “assess and improve birth certificate data in response to a new re-use of birth certificate data for measurements introduced to hold hospitals accountable for the quality of the care they are delivering,” according to the paper abstract.
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The Center for Technology, Society and Policy (CTSP) at UC Berkeley has named informatics Ph.D. student Katherine Lo and former ICS postdoctoral researcher Morgan Ames fellows, resulting in a CTSP collaborative project. Lo and Ames’ project, “Promoting Ethical Technical Cultures and Digital Citizenship for Low-Income and Minority Students in Richmond, California,” centers on creating ethical technical cultures.

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As children grow up immersed in information and technology, educators face new challenges in engaging their students. Mizuko “Mimi” Ito’s response: “Meet kids where they are, and push them to go further.”

Ito’s Connected Learning model reimagines the experience of education for the information age. It’s a hands-on, production-centered approach that draws on young people’s interests and friendships to help keep them engaged in academic pursuits.

Read the full story on the UW Information School website.

In a survey of 1,800 Note to Self listeners earlier this month, nearly 80 percent of respondents told us that sometimes they get headaches, insomnia or eye twitches as a result of information overload — but they still continue consuming more.

Gloria Mark, informatics professor at the University of California, Irvine, has found that the habit is a self-perpetuating cycle.

She uses sensors — Fitbit-like “acto-graphs,” lightweight cameras, heart rate monitors and regular “probes” — to measure how our bodies and emotions react when we spend time online. And her lab’s findings have been fairly consistent: Interruptions stress us out and keep us from properly concentrating, which stresses us out further, disrupting our concentration further, and on and on.

Read the full story on the NPR website.

Professor Gloria Mark at UC Irvine’s Department of Informatics recently completed study that suggests that the less sleep we get, the shorter our attention span is on any computer screen the next day – and the more likely we are to gravitate toward social media. “If you’re really tired,” she said, “you’re not really mentally prepared to do heavy-duty work. You tend to do lightweight activities like Facebook.”

Read the full story on Los Angeles Times website.

White-collar workers check their inboxes an average of 77 times a day, according to research by Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at the University of California, Irvine. (If that sounds low to you, she found some workers check email far more frequently, up to 343 times a day or more.) The more time people spend focused on email, Mark has found, the less happy and productive they are.

Read the full story on The Atlantic website.