Raising Good Gamers today unveiled its advisory board, which includes 32 individuals from a wide range of companies, and outlined its roadmap to create a “more diverse, inclusive and positive online environment for youth”.
The initiative was launched this summer by non-profit organisation Games for Change, which champions the games industry to make real-life impact, in partnership with Connected Learning Lab from the University of California, Irvine.
Read the full story at gamesindustry.biz.
Getting hands-on project experience is critical for most students in any field. At UC Irvine, in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science, all ICS majors are required to take a capstone course so they have the opportunity to stretch themselves beyond classroom learning, while benefitting local non-profits, corporations, and even UCI.
The projects range from websites and mobile apps, to non-coding projects, like analyzing a technology need or creating a list of requirements for a new system. “Often our students work with a group that is using technology in a clunky way,” said Emily Navarro, an ICS faculty member who teaches capstone courses. “They work to modernize, secure, and streamline the technology – or they build something new.”
Read the full story on the UC IT Blog.
“We know that one of the key purposes of play is socialization,” says Katie Salen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies game design and learning. By around 3-years-old, kids begin to play productively with one another and engage in peer-based play, which helps kids learn how to make friends and interact with other people. “Once they enter pre-adolescence, it’s very peer-based,” she explains. “The play and experimentation is very much rooted in the peer group and issues of exploring identity and friendship and belonging.”
Read the full story at EdSurge.
It’s not just investment banks that are biased towards elite upper middle class students, it turns out that the big technology companies are too. If you want to make it through to an internship at the likes of Google, Amazon or Facebook a new study suggests that you’ll need to show (or fake) that you’re the right sort of person.
Read the full story at eFinancialCareers.
Working parents toggle constantly among competing commitments, but many don’t want to do less; they want to do it all, better.
Read the full story at The New York Times.
One unique element of fan fiction is the community that coalesces in support of writers. The feedback writers get in fan fiction communities helps them get better. Professor Rebecca Black learned about how helpful fan fiction communities can be when she studied English Language Learners who write fan fiction. These students felt insecure about their language skills in school, but developed confidence by practicing writing in fan fic forums and getting feedback.
Read the full story at KQED.
While it feels like social media has been around for an eternity, the truth is that it’s still a fairly recent technology. That means that we are only beginning to understand how it affects its users on individual and group levels. Even less is understood about how children, teens, and tweens interact with platforms such as TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat. Fortunately, researchers are beginning to address the paucity of information. SCINQ discussed the findings of a recent report (Youth Connections for Wellbeing) on social media use with its authors from the University of California, Irvine, Mimi Ito and Stephen Schueller.
Read the full story at Scientific Inquirer.
As such, some students at the University of California are concerned that — despite reassurances to the contrary — their institution’s new financial relationship with Thoma Bravo will mean their personal data can be sold or otherwise misused. “It appears that the UC may be invested — however indirectly — in the monetization of data collected from their own students,” Mustafa Hussain, a PhD candidate in Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, told Salon in a statement.
Read the full story at Salon.
Gloria Mark, a digital distraction expert and professor at the University of California, Irvine found that an average office worker gets only 11 minutes between interruptions, and that it takes 25 minutes for us to return to what we were doing before the interruption.
Read the full story at Thrive Global.
Prohibiting changes to author names on published works can harm vulnerable people.
Read the full article at Nature.