Often education is conceived of as a “pipeline,” where we push kids along a set path from kindergarten, to elementary, high school, and so on. But when we talk to young people and really look at where and how they learn, and who they learn with, it looks more like a network.
Read the full story at Newsworks.
Stop interrupting yourself. Stop putting all the blame on Joan from down the hall … you’re just as much to blame for the interuptions. “What fascinates me is that people interrupted themselves almost as much as they were interrupted by external sources,” said Gloria Mark, associate professor at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, who conducted a study on workplace interruptions. “They interrupted themselves about 44 percent of the time.” Indulging the urge to check in on social media or responding to a text message are internal sources of interruption you may not even be aware you are committing.
Read the full story at NBC News.
From electronic health records to personal health apps, information technology (IT) has proliferated in the healthcare sector over the past few years. This has led to the increased availability of electronic data and the improved capability of clinical decision making. Most notably, consumer-facing applications—mobile health apps, wearable devices and sensors, and assistive technologies—have become prevalent, reshaping the landscape of patient education, health management, and public-health practices. It is therefore not surprising that designers and researchers are optimistic about the prospects of health IT. Many firmly believe these innovations represent a powerful source of disruption that will fundamentally change how healthcare is practiced.
Read the full story at Interactions.
Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics Paul Dourish has published a new book titled The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information about the digital representations that help shape our computerized existence.
On one end of our digital experience are interactive virtual entities like online stores, e-books and whole virtual worlds. On the other end are the physical infrastructures that support them, such as fiber optic cables and server farms. The Stuff of Bits examines the domain between these virtual and physical entities that make up our computer-generated experiences and focuses on these digital representations encoded into software, loaded into computer memory, shared between networks and stored in our databases.
In recent months, several professional gamers in the esports world have been in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons: incidents of sexual harassment, abuse of power and horrifyingly explicit racist rants.
It’s easy to read these high-profile stories and think they’re strange, one-time occurrences — but for those who play games online, these displays of toxic masculinity are an everyday reality. And if you don’t fit the stereotype of a gamer — meaning you’re not a straight, white male — these racist, sexist and homophobic online encounters with total strangers are much more likely to occur.
So, what effect do these more high-profile incidents have on the gaming world at large? Do they spark change within communities or simply model bad behavior that normal gamers will be all too eager to emulate? We spoke with Kat Lo — a Ph.D. student and researcher in online communities and harassment at University of California, Irvine — to suss it all out.
Read the full story at Mic.
“Content moderation is a necessary but limited solution,” Kat Lo, a PhD student at the University of California, Irvine who is studying online communities and moderation, told me. “The fact that Facebook is adding 3,000 more content moderators is great for Facebook consumers but the fact is you’re subjecting a lot more people to something we’ve seen as very traumatic.”
Read the full story at Motherboard on Vice.com.
College Choice, an independent online publication, just released its list of the “35 Best Masters in Information Technology for 2017,” in which UCI’s M.S. in Informatics was ranked No. 22. The College Choice review team gave the informatics graduate degree program an almost perfect score of 97.03 out of 100.
According to College Choice, “Whether they come from the arts or the sciences, UCI’s M.S. in Informatics students share one a common desire to seek to build a deeper understanding of the relationship between people and technology.”
Informatics Ph.D. candidates Kathryn Ringland and Christine Wolf formally received their ARCS Scholars Awards for 2016-17 from the National ARCS (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) Foundation on March 16, 2017. The two were honored during the 17th Annual Scholar Awards Dinner held at UCI’s Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center. During the ceremony, Ringland and Wolf were reminded of their contributions to the fields of computer science and informatics.
In February, informatics Ph.D. student Kate Ringland teamed up with Broadway choreographer and UCI Assistant Professor of Drama Andrew Palermo to create DanceCraft, a software program that is part of a six-segment dance study on autism.
“It started as a project for Autism App Jam one year and we realized there was real potential for good in it,” said Ringland. “I worked with a great team of undergraduates to build DanceCraft. It’s been an important side project for me.”
Dance can help children diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with body awareness, one of several sensory atypicalities associated with ASD.
Continue reading
Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow Paul Dourish is the featured ACM member in the April 2017 issue (Vol. 60, No. 4) of Communications of the ACM magazine. The article, titled “Looking to computers to help make sense of the world,” provides a brief look at Dourish, how he became interested in computer science, as well as his current focus on human-computer interactions, particularly the social implications of information technology. Read the full article about Dourish online.