“I’ve never seen anything like the Minecraft phenomenon,” said learning scientist and Connected Camps co-founder Mimi Ito, who has been researching games-based learning for more than two decades. “For the first time, we have an opportunity to connect play and learning through a massively successful commercial title that is loved by kids, parents, and educators alike.”
Read the full story on the Benzinga website.
Research has shown that for every interruption it takes an average of 25 minutes to fully regain your cognitive focus. Dr. Gloria Mark, associate professor at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, found average information workers are interrupted every three minutes – nearly 20 times an hour, while the average manager is interrupted every eight minutes. In an eight-hour day most of us are interrupted 50 to 60 times, for on average five minutes — that works out to more than four hours out of eight, or 50% of the workday.
Read the full story on the Financial Post website.
The third annual competition expands collaboration while continuing to facilitate the discussion about technological interventions to aid those affected by autism.
There are two types of people in the world: those with hundreds of unread messages, and those who can’t relax until their inboxes are cleared out.
Read the full story on the Atlantic website.
The 3-week course will teach students about biological parasites and cyber attacks.
The course will be taught by a team from the UC Irvine faculty: Pavan Kadandale, molecular biology and biochemistry; Hadar Ziv, information and computer science; and Sarah Eichhorn, physical sciences.
Read the full story on the Digital Spy website.
The very technology driving us to distraction can help us refocus and be productive.
Your lack of focus isn’t likely to be a case of adult onset attention deficit disorder, according to ADD expert Dr. Ned Halloway. That’s a condition diagnosed in only about 5% of the population. Instead, professor Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, who has studied distraction and its effects on productivity, argues that we can point the finger on the very technology that enables our work.
Read the full story on the Fast Company website.
In this digital age, we have assumed that smartphones and apps are the new normal for youth.
A recently released Pew Research Center report on teens and technology further corroborates this belief by showing that 88% of US teens have access to a mobile phone. Of these, 73% have smartphones and 15% only a basic cell phone.
But it’s worth pausing to consider what online participation looks like for the 15% of teens with basic cell phones or the 12% who don’t have access to any form of mobile phone and what kind of a new “digital divide” might be emerging.
In other words, low-income teens are unable to participate in the social media conversations of their wealthier peers.
Our team at the University of California, Irvine, has been conducting research and developing programs in coding and digital media for these less-connected youth. The nationally representative sample in the Pew data provides context for these populations of urban teens who we work with day-to-day in Southern California.
Read the full story on the Conversation website.
Informatics Ph.D. student Katherine Lo has received the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. The scholarship supports women in technology with a $10,000 financial award for the academic year as well as an invitation to the annual Google Scholars’ Retreat, which offers unique professional development and community outreach opportunities, at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. In addition to her Ph.D. studies, Lo is an adviser to the student organization Women in Information and Computer Sciences (WICS) at UC Irvine. She has previously received an honorable mention from the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).
A visiting professor of anthropology to New Mexico State University gave a presentation on April 17 about the economic benefits that video game developers get from the free labor of their players.
Bonnie Nardi is an anthropologist in the School of Information and Computer Science at University of California – Irvine. Nardi started studying “World of Warcraft” almost 10 years ago when some of the undergraduates she was teaching started talking about such games as “WoW” and “EverQuest.”
Read the full story on NSMU’s The Roundup website.
Informatics Professor Judith Olson has won many accolades and been widely published over the years, but it’s not often that you are recognized by the likes of Google Co-founder and CEO Larry Page. In a book recently released titled The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, Page acknowledges the impact Olson had on him as a student: “The college course that made the greatest impression on me was one on human-computer interaction taught by Judith Olson. The goal was to understand how to design interfaces that were easy and intuitive.”