The California Chronicles
10+ years experience as Principal Researcher on several projects at multiple institutions and presented internationally at multiple professional conferences.
UX RESEARCH
Taught at the college-level as instructor of record for 10+ courses on 6 different topics, including Knowledge Management, Business Informatics, English, and Communications, as well as participated in the creation of 3 novel curricula.
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There is a strong push for organisations to become more transparent and accountable for their undertakings. Towards this, various transparency regimes oblige organisations to disclose certain information to relevant stakeholders (individuals, regulators, etc). This information intends to empower and support the monitoring, oversight, scrutiny and challenge of organisational practices. Importantly, however, these disclosures are of limited benefit if they are not meaningful for their recipients. Yet, in practice, the disclosures of tech/data-driven organisations are often highly technical, fragmented, and therefore of limited utility to all but experts. This undermines a disclosure’s effectiveness, works to disempower, and ultimately hinders broader transparency aims.
This paper argues for a paradigm shift towards reconceptualising disclosures as ‘interfaces’ – designed for the needs, expectations and requirements of the recipients they serve to inform. In making this case, and to provide a practical way forward, we demonstrate Document Engineering as one potential methodology for specifying, designing, and deploying more effective information disclosures. Focusing on data protection disclosures, we illustrate and explore how designing disclosures as interfaces can better support greater oversight of organisational data and practices, and thus better align with broader transparency and accountability aims.
CSUN’s pilot Pre-Statistics course, MATH 096S, prepares students for their subsequent Introductory Statistics course (MATH 140) by providing arithmetic and algebraic backgrounds essential to statistical reasoning. As we were not fully satisfied with the Statway® material and with the Math Lit book we used during the first two pilot years respectively (2011/12 and 2012/13), our team developed a new workbook for MATH 096S during summer 2013. The material in the workbook is presented in the form of a novel: Four college students take a road trip, and as they travel across America they solve application problems pertinent to each part of their journey. Rather than proceeding through mathematics topics in a traditional sequence, the workbook engages students in mathematical and statistical analysis from day one by integrating English, math, statistics, and topics from science throughout.
During the Spring semester of 2014, while the MATH 096S course was still under the course redesign process, we used ALEKS (an online homework system provided by McGraw- Hill publishing company) for the online component of the course, but it did not cover all the topics we cover in the workbook, and it did not align with the spirit of our new workbook at all. Extensive searching of available online homework systems established that none exists that would complement the workbook, and, therefore, we decided to create our own online homework component for the course.
The primary objective of the project was to develop an online homework library and other resources for our MATH 096S course that would align closely with the story and problems in the workbook. Matching the spirit of the workbook, this online component of the course is also presented as part of the road-trip journey. Students might choose one of the characters, for instance, and they themselves become part of the story solving real life problems similar to the workbook problems. The platform we use for our online component is the XYZ publishing company, who coded our homework problems into their system. Students gain access by purchasing a year-long access code for a very reasonable cost of $30. The company maintains our homework library in the future, but we hold the copyright of the problems.
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Why present digital and psychical methods of resistance together? This question grounds the argument that this zine attempts to make. This zine hopes to highlight the importance of identifying the ways surveillance is enacted by external forces that leverage the junction points of where the digital meets the physical. When your digital presence becomes physical and vice versa, traces exist that make it easier for you to be surveilled, tracked, and recorded. Suggestions on how to protect yourself against surveillance in the digital and physical worlds will overlap quite a bit; that is to say separating the digital from the physical in terms of surveillance techniques and protections is becoming an increasingly difficult task.
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VOID LAB
A Panel on Pornography, Machine Intimacy, Digital Selves and the Ethics of Live Cam Labor.