Digital native identity development in virtual worlds

In the transition from childhood to adolescence, teens are engaged in defining who they are and finding a place in the wide world creates insecurity. Digital natives are growing up as part of digital generation where technology is ubiquitous in a young person’s life. One online technology commonly used by digital natives are virtual worlds. Increasingly, they have come to rely on this digital media to help them navigate the challenges and issues they face in this period of life. This paper presents a research framework designed to provide a road map for the IS community in conducting research into this new and exciting area of virtual worlds and their impact on digital native identity development

Issues in the study of virtual world social movements

Virtual worlds are online three-dimensional worlds that are often constructed to look much like the real world. As more people begin to use these virtual worlds, virtual communities are emerging enabling various social activities and social interactions to be conducted online. Based on a literature review of social movements, virtual communities and virtual worlds, this paper suggests a framework to guide IS research into this new and exciting area

The ‘responsibility’ factor in imagining the future of education in China

Design and creativity have been a considerable force for improving life conditions. A lot of effort has been invested in explaining the design process and creativity mainly through the design thinking methodology, but design accountability and responsible actions in the design process are, yet, to be fully explored. The concept of design ethics is now increasingly scrutinized on both the level of business organization and of the individual designer. A 4-day design workshop that involved creativity techniques provided the base to explore responsibility in the fuzzy front end of the design process. The future of education in 2030 was defined as the workshop's theme and fifty-six students from China were asked to create detailed alternative scenarios. A number of imagination exercises, implementation of technological innovations and macro-environment evolutions employed in the workshop are discussed. The aim was to incite moral and responsible actions among students less familiar with creative educational contexts of student-led discovery and collaborative learning. This paper reflects on the use of creativity methods to stimulate anticipation in (non)design students

Improving fairness in machine learning systems: What do industry practitioners need?

The potential for machine learning (ML) systems to amplify social inequities and unfairness is receiving increasing popular and academic attention. A surge of recent work has focused on the development of algorithmic tools to assess and mitigate such unfairness. If these tools are to have a positive impact on industry practice, however, it is crucial that their design be informed by an understanding of real-world needs. Through 35 semi-structured interviews and an anonymous survey of 267 ML practitioners, we conduct the first systematic investigation of commercial product teams' challenges and needs for support in developing fairer ML systems. We identify areas of alignment and disconnect between the challenges faced by industry practitioners and solutions proposed in the fair ML research literature. Based on these findings, we highlight directions for future ML and HCI research that will better address industry practitioners' needs.Comment: To appear in the 2019 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2019

When Do People Trust Their Social Groups?

Trust facilitates cooperation and supports positive outcomes in social groups, including member satisfaction, information sharing, and task performance. Extensive prior research has examined individuals' general propensity to trust, as well as the factors that contribute to their trust in specific groups. Here, we build on past work to present a comprehensive framework for predicting trust in groups. By surveying 6,383 Facebook Groups users about their trust attitudes and examining aggregated behavioral and demographic data for these individuals, we show that (1) an individual's propensity to trust is associated with how they trust their groups, (2) smaller, closed, older, more exclusive, or more homogeneous groups are trusted more, and (3) a group's overall friendship-network structure and an individual's position within that structure can also predict trust. Last, we demonstrate how group trust predicts outcomes at both individual and group level such as the formation of new friendship ties.Comment: CHI 201

Exploring approaches to the generation and representation of heritage artefacts in video game contexts

© 2016, © 2016 University of Wollongong. Video games can allow players to explore environments, which are representative of, or contain elements of physical world cultures, for example, allowing a player to explore ancient Egypt in Pharaoh (Impressions Games, 1999, Pharaoh [PC Game]. Sierra Entertainment) or present day Chicago in Watchdogs (Ubisoft Montreal, 2014, [PlayStation 4 game] . Guildford), etc. Game designers need to make design decisions regarding how these environments are going to be represented, including which items are going to be utilized, how they are going to be used in the game, and the level of detail to which they are going to be presented. These decisions can lead to concerns regarding how particular cultures are represented. This article describes research undertaken to investigate the design process with respect to the inclusion of physical world cultures in virtual game environments. Within the study approaches used (including processes and methods) by game designers in the stages of conceptualization, design and delivery are explored. In addition, these are contextualized through an understanding of designer attitudes towards the inclusion of items with cultural meaning and their perspectives on the importance of cultural representation within video games. This involved interviewing eight video game designers from global contexts within the industry, all with the experience of generating cultural items for inclusion in video game contexts. These interviews were structured with a focus on exploring views, experiences, beliefs and motivations of the individuals and of their working teams. Analysis was carried out through the use of a methodological process of analytical induction with the coding of particular variables within each interview transcript, and the transformation of the complete set of codings into a set of conceptual statements. This article relates these conceptual statements to earlier work regarding close readings of particular video games and discusses the relationship between design processes (facilitated through the interviews) and realized game worlds (facilitated through the close readings)

NASA Space Human Factors Program

This booklet briefly and succinctly treats 23 topics of particular interest to the NASA Space Human Factors Program. Most articles are by different authors who are mainly NASA Johnson or NASA Ames personnel. Representative topics covered include mental workload and performance in space, light effects on Circadian rhythms, human sleep, human reasoning, microgravity effects and automation and crew performance

An analysis of core-competences of successful multinational team leaders

Copyright @ 2010 The Authors. This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.Researchers have endeavoured to understand the factors that enable effective functioning of multinational teams (MNTs) but with few exceptions they have ignored studying the competences of MNT leaders. In this paper we present those competences leaders must possess in order to effectively lead MNTs. Our findings are based on 70 problem-centred interviews with MNT leaders and members from five multinational corporations. The competences our interviewees mentioned most frequently for effective leadership were knowledge management and transfer. Results further indicated that a leader must be cross-culturally competent and multilingual in order to motivate MNT members to fully explore, exploit and transfer valuable knowledge within the team and beyond