Communication and Security Issues in Online Education: Student Self-Disclosure in Course Introductions

In designing online and hybrid courses, instructors should consider structure, student motivation, and interaction (per Moore’s 1993 Theory of Transactional Distance). To motivate students to interact and to build course community, instructors may assign student introductions. However, after examining students’ introductions in a hybrid content-design course and an online design course, we noted that students self-disclosed private information in their introductions, whether to classmates or instructors. To investigate further, we analyzed the content of discussion-board and email-to-instructor introductions in a community college (first data set). Then, we analyzed discussion-board and memo-to-instructor introductions at a four-year university (second data set). We identified categories in the information that students disclosed, noting that they shared demographic, professional, academic, and personal information, some of which were identifiers that could compromise the students’ privacy. Our findings are relevant to professional communication, instruction design, pedagogy, and writing research as the study sheds light on issues that we address as investigators, instructors, and student advocates in a variety of contexts, specifically online spaces

Design Communication: Transfer of Design Principles & Practice

The report documents a consultancy undertaken for Traidcraft, UK focused on one of their long-standing suppliers St. Mary's Mahila Shikshan Kendra (SMSK), Ahmedabad in the provision of training in design innovation, to both consolidate and sustain their existing creative practice in embroidered products and to support and facilitate the progressive development of design expertise at SMSK. Traidcraft is the UK’s leading Fairtrade organisation and has had a valued relationship with SMSK that stretches back over thirty years and accounts for 11% of SMSK turnover. A lack design and product innovation expertise and products that are not responsive to rapidly-changing market trends places ‘remote’ suppliers like SMSK at a disadvantage in the volatile conditions of today’s globalised market. In examining the needs of SMSK, the project served to illuminate the challenges of co-collaboration between designer, supplier and a Fair Trade organization, exploring particular characteristics of their market that distinguish it from the mainstream commercial marketplace and issues in respect of consumer perceptions of ‘value for money’ in the purchase of a handcrafted product. The intervention focused on developing the design skills of SMSK’s in-house self taught ‘designer’, facilitating his understanding of design methods as a means to evolve, innovate and enhance the product range, creating new styles and ‘added value’ without losing the key characteristics of fine embroidery skills and attention to quality control reflected in SMSK’s products. The advisory report frames the staged objectives informed by evaluation of existing skills-base, products and market penetration, examining the project methodology and activities undertaken to realize the objectives of project, namely to encourage strengthening and capacity-building of design expertise within the supplier group and puts forward recommendations for further interventions within the supplier group and the transferability of the pilot model to other groups within Traidcraft’s supplier network

Social Intelligence Design for Mediated Communication

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Constitutional Design and Political Communication

This paper models the constitutional design process, and points out the importance of political communication (defined as the level of information about the social distribution of policy preferences that individuals hold, at the time of this process) on the "extent" of "democratic restraints" of the socially preferred constitution and on the welfare derived by the society from its implementation. The results demonstrate that the level of political communication has a positive effect on the level of democracy of the socially preferred constitution and on social welfare. Moreover, it is proved that, even if there exist no tolerance for dictatorship by societies in general, the level of democracy demanded by the society, reaches the maximum possible level, only if political communication is "perfect". That is, the socially preferred constitution in cases of "imperfect" political communication incorporates both dictatorial and democratic elements.constitution, political communication, democracy

Mechanism Design and Communication Networks

This paper characterizes the class of communication networks for which, in any environment (utilities and beliefs), every incentive-compatible social choice function is (partially) implementable. Among others, in environments with either common and independent beliefs and private values or a bad outcome, we show that if the communication network is 2-connected, then any incentive-compatible social choice function is implementable. A network is 2-connected if each player is either directly connected to the designer or indirectly connected to the designer through at least two disjoint paths. We couple encryption techniques together with appropriate incentives to secure the transmission of each player’s private information to the designer.Mechanism design; incentives; Bayesian equilibrium; communication networks; encryption; secure transmission; coding

Mechanism design with private communication

We investigate the consequences of assuming "private" communication between the principal and each of his agents in an otherwise standard mechanism design setting.Doing so simplifies significantly optimal mechanisms and institutions. Moreover, it restores continuity of the principal's payoff and of the optimal mechanism with respect to the information structure while still maintaining the useful role of correlation to better extract the agents' information rent. We first prove a "Revelation Principle with private communication" that characterizes the set of allocations implementable under private communication by means of simple "non-manipulability constraints". We also demonstrate a "Taxation Principle" which helps drawing some links between private communication and limited commitment on the principal's side. Equipped with those tools, we derive optimal non-manipulable mechanisms in various environments (unrelated projects, auctions, team production).MECHANISM DESIGN;PRIVATE COMMUNICATION

Communication: key factor in multidisciplinary system design

System design research often looks at ways to model the system that is developing. Many modelling techniques and model representations exist. Another aspect these models can be used for is to enable, facilitate and improve communication among the developers during the process. The young System Design Group at the faculty of Engineering Technology of the University of Twente, the Netherlands, aims at focusing on this communication aspect in system design.\ud In the paper, a few finished and running projects undertaken in close cooperation with industry are described concisely. From these projects three research themes are derived. These are: creation of high-level models, combining model representations and condense information. The paper ends with plans for future research