http://hdl.handle.net/1903/2780 2013-05-22T21:31:10Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13499 Title: ENABLING GEOGRAPHICALLY DISTRIBUTED, INTERGENERATIONAL, CO-OPERATIVE DESIGN Authors: Walsh, Gregory Abstract: As more children's technologies are designed to be used with a global audience, new technologies need to be created to include more children's voices in the design process. However, working with those who that are geographically distributed as design partners is difficult because existing technologies do not support this process, do not enable distributed design, or are not child-friendly. In this dissertation, I take a research-through-design approach to develop an online environment that enables geographically distributed, intergenerational co-operative design. I began my research with participant-observations of in-person, co-located intergeneration co-operative design sessions that used Cooperative Inquiry techniques at the University of Maryland. I then analyzed those observations, determined a framework that occurs during in-person design sessions and developed a prototype online design environment based on that scaffolding. With the initial prototype deployed to a geographic distributed, intergenerational co-design team, I employed Cooperative Inquiry to design new children's technologies with children. I iteratively developed the prototype environment over eight weeks to better support geographically distributed co-design. Adults and children participated in these design sessions and there was no significant difference between the children and adults in the number of design sessions in which they chose to participate. After the design research on the prototype was complete, I interviewed the child participants who were in the online intergenerational design team to better understand their experiences. During the interviews, I found that the child participants had strong expectations of social interaction within the online design environment and were frustrated by the lack of seeing other participants online at the same time. In order to alleviate this problem, five of the participants involved their families in some way in the design process and created small, remote intergenerational design teams to compensate for the perceived shortcomings of the online environment. I compared Online Kidsteam with in-person Kidsteam to evaluate if the online environment was successful in supporting geographically-distributed, intergeneration co-design. I found that although it was not the same in terms of the social aspects of in-person Kidsteam, it was successful in its ability to include more people in the design process. 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/12701 Title: Values in the Net Neutrality Debate: Applying Content Analysis to Testimonies from Public Hearings Authors: Cheng, An-Shou Abstract: The Net neutrality debate is an important telecommunications policy issue that closely tied to technological innovation, economic development, and information access. Existing studies on Net neutrality have focused primarily on technological requirements, economic analysis, and regulatory justifications. Since values, technology, and policy are interrelated, it is important to consider the role of human values in the design and regulation of telecommunications infrastructure. To analyze the role of human values in shaping the Net neutrality debate, this dissertation focuses on a corpus of public hearings related to Net neutrality that provide useful data points that help to expose the values of various stakeholders in the Net neutrality debate. Content analysis of testimonies from Congressional and FCC hearings on Net neutrality is employed to study values expressed by stakeholders. The major findings of this study include (1) the Net neutrality debate can be framed in terms of values expressed by proponents and opponents of Net neutrality; (2) there are differences in values expressed among positions, stakeholder groups, venues, and time periods in the Net neutrality debate; and (3) differences in values expressed by proponents and opponents of Net neutrality have changed over time. This dissertation advances the understanding of values expressed by stakeholders in the Net neutrality debate, informs the process of agenda setting and decision-making related to Net neutrality policy-making, and fills the gap in the connection between IT policy and values research. 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/12403 Title: Information Seeking in Context: Teachers' Content Selection during Lesson Planning Using the Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive of Holocaust Survivor Testimony Authors: Lawley, Kathryn Newton Abstract: This study explored the information seeking task of content selection. An integrative conceptual framework used existing models to examine the context and process of information seeking, evaluation, and selection. The conceptual framework incorporated three main elements of the information seeking process: * The information need context, * The information search process, * Relevance criteria. Among teachers' many duties are the creation, implementation, and revision of lesson plans. A subtask of lesson planning is content selection, which occurs when teachers seek outside content, such as readings or audio recordings, to incorporate into lesson plans. Content selection is seen here as a work-task-embedded information seeking process. A qualitative study was implemented within the setting of a week-long professional development workshop, during which eight teachers used a custom software product that combined a lesson-planning module with an information retrieval (IR) system. The IR system provided access to a subset of the Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive. Data types included interviews, fly-on-the-wall transcripts, transaction logs, relevance judgments, and lesson plans. Analysis combined inductive and deductive techniques, including start codes, constant comparison, emergent themes, and matrix analysis. Findings depict associations among each component of the framework. 1. The information need context consists of five layers (Environment, Role, Person, Task, Information Source), each of which influences information search and relevance. 2. The ISP includes two cognitive-behavioral facets: Conceptualizing and Actualizing. 3. Relevance criteria are the situationally-driven embodiment of contextual elements that apply to information seeking. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for information studies and education. For information studies, this study contributes to understanding of the ISP as contextual, cognitive, and interactive. Information need, while unobservable in its native form, can be depicted in enough detail to supply meaningful requirements for the design of information systems and processes. Content selection is a form of exploratory search, and this study's implications suggest that the "traditional" reference interview should be used as an interaction model during exploratory search. For education, this study extends the discourse about consequences of standards-based education for teacher practice and contributes to models of teacher planning as an iterative, cognitive process. 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/11530 Title: Studying the Relationships of Information Technology Concepts Authors: Tsui, Chia-jung Abstract: Different information technology concepts are related in complex ways. How can the relationships among multiple IT concepts be described and analyzed in a scalable way? It is a challenging research question, not only because of the complex relationships among IT concepts, but also due to lack of reliable methods. Seeking to meet the challenge, this dissertation offers a computational approach for analyzing, visualizing, and understanding the relationships among IT concepts. The dissertation contains five empirical studies. The first study employs Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to compare the semantic similarity of forty-seven IT concepts discussed in a trade magazine over a ten-year period. Results show that the similarity of IT concepts can be mapped in a hierarchy and similar technologies demonstrated similar discourses. The second study employs co-occurrence analysis to explore the relationships among fifty IT concepts in six magazines over ten years. Results show general patterns similar to those found in the first study, but with interesting nuances. Together, findings from the first two studies imply reasonable validity of this computational approach. The third study validates and evaluates the approach, making use of an existing thesaurus as ground truth. Results show that the co-occurrence-based IT classification outperforms the KL divergence-based IT classification in agreeing with the ground truth. The fourth study is a survey of information professionals who help evaluate this computational approach. Results are generally consistent with the findings in the previous study. The fifth study explores the co-occurrence analysis further and has generated IT classifications very much similar to the ground truth. The computational approach developed in this dissertation is expected to help IT practitioners and researchers make sense of the numerous concepts in the IT field. Overall, the dissertation establishes a good foundation for studying the relationships of IT concepts in a representative, dynamic, and scalable way. 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z