Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item #BlackLiteracyLivesMatter: REVEALING AFRICAN AMERICAN ADOLESCENTS’ MULTIMODAL LITERACY PRACTICES IN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS AT A COMMUNITY CENTER(2016) Pope, Kelsey; Turner, Jennifer; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigated the multimodal literacy practices of African American adolescents as they navigated online social networks. Participants ranged from ages 13 to 17 and resided in an inner city East Coast neighborhood. Data collection tools included an online social network survey, online social networking activities log, audio recorded literacy interviews, and screenshots. Pieces of data were carefully analyzed and coded for potential literacy practices. The study revealed four distinct literacy practices of this particular group of African American adolescents: communication, entertainment, information gathering, and taking a stance. Participant data defined each multimodal literacy practice while explaining how and why skills and experiences combined to create the practice. Engagement in online social networks involved these multimodal literacy practices. Often they involved interactions with peers and family members. Participants did not readily compare their multimodal online social network literacy practices to traditional forms of literacy, however, they used traditional words such as reading, writing, and spelling to explain their skills and experiences. Literacy was brought to life in a unique way through the words and multiple modes of communication, entertainment, information gathering, and stance taking of participants. This study questions ‘what’ and possibly ‘whose’ literacy counts. Technology and its affordances allowed participants to engage in practices through multiple modes. Additionally, this group of African American adolescents exposed an avenue through which race related injustices and tensions might be expressed through multimodal literacy practices in online social networks. The results of this study encourages future research to examine what literacy counts, whose literacy counts, and how or why adolescents engage through literacy practices. #BlackLiteracyLivesMatterItem Sharing Private Data Over Public Networks(2012) Baden, Randy; Bhattacharjee, Bobby; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Users share their sensitive personal data with each other through public services and applications provided by third parties. Users trust application providers with their private data since they want access to provided services. However, trusting third parties with private data can be risky: providers profit by sharing that data with others regardless of the user's desires and may fail to provide the security necessary to prevent data leaks. Though users may choose between service providers, in many cases no service providers provide the desired service without being granted access to user data. Users must make a choice: forego privacy or be denied service. I demonstrate that fine-grained user privacy policies and rich services and applications are not irreconcilable. I provide technical solutions to privacy problems that protect user data using cryptography while still allowing services to operate on that data. I do this primarily through content-agnostic references to data items and user-controlled pseudonymity. I support two classes of social networking applications without trusting third parties with private data: applications which do not require data contents to provide a service, and applications that deal with data where the only private information is the binding of the data to an identity. Together, these classes of applications encompass a broad range of social networking applications.