Reaching out with OER: the new role of public-facing open scholar

Open educational resources (OER) and, more recently, open educational practices (OEP) have been widely promoted as a means of increasing openness in higher education (HE). Thus far, such openness has been limited by OER provision typically being supplier-driven and contained within the boundaries of HE. Seeking to explore ways in which OEP might become more needs-led we conceptualised a new ‘public-facing open scholar’ role involving academics working with online communities to source and develop OER to meet their needs. To explore the scope for this role we focused on the voluntary sector, which we felt might particularly benefit from such collaboration. We evaluated four representative communities for evidence of their being self-educating (thereby offering the potential for academics to contribute) and for any existing learning dimension. We found that all four communities were self-educating and each included learning infrastructure elements, for example provision for web chats with ‘experts’, together with evidence of receptiveness to academic collaboration. This indicated that there was scope for the role of public-facing open scholar. We therefore developed detailed guidelines for performing the role, which has the potential to be applied beyond the voluntary sector and to greatly extend the beneficial impact of existing OER, prompting institutions to release new OER in response to the needs of people outside HE

The gift of the code: A culture of an operating system

“The Gift of the Code” explores the boundaries between technology and sociality, computers and cultures. Based on long-term ethnographic research among users and developers of GNU/Linux Operating System, this work analyses how Linux developers and users consume, create and exchange an as much technical as cultural discursive construction of sociality. Like a modern-day kula ring, the Linux code is analysed in terms of a gift: one cannot keep it for one’s self, it contains obligations and a promise of future reciprocity. It is a collective gift of the self-ascribed Hackers that come from different geographic places and meet in lines of code, socializing by exchanging ideas about the code and about themselves. This work shows by what means the computer hackers of Linux, abiding to the original definition of the word, actively constitute their community using discourse: language, e-mail, internal meritocratic hierarchies based on technical ability and ethics of the group, boundaries of exclusion and inclusion. This project is about power relations, resistance networks and the hegemony of a techno-scientific self-indulgence of some post-residents of an imagined cyber-West. Equally, it is about the giving of gifts, hacker culture and the ‘fun’ of hacking, creating and maintaining a ‘guerrilla’ operating system. Studying the anthropology of GNU/Linux operating system is a journey towards an investigation of what makes the social into technology and how technology is translated into sociality

DYSWIS: Collaborative Network Fault Diagnosis - Of End-users, By End-users, For End-users

With increase in application complexity, the need for network faults diagnosis for end-users has increased. However, existing failure diagnosis techniques fail to assist the endusers in accessing the applications and services. We present DYSWIS, an automatic network fault detection and diagnosis system for end-users. The key idea is collaboration of end-users; a node requests multiple nodes to diagnose a network fault in real time to collect diverse information from different parts of the networks and infer the cause of failure. DYSWIS leverages DHT network to search the collaborating nodes with appropriate network properties required to diagnose a failure. The framework allows dynamic updating of rules and probes into a running system. Another key aspect is contribution of expert knowledge (rules and probes) by application developers, vendors and network administrators; thereby enabling crowdsourcing of diagnosis strategy for growing set of applications. We have implemented the framework and the software and tested them using our test bed and PlanetLab to show that several complex commonly occurring failures can be detected and diagnosed successfully using DYSWIS, while single-user probe with traditional tools fails to pinpoint the cause of such failures. We validate that our base modules and rules are sufficient to detect infrastructural failures causing majority of application failures

How WEIRD is Usable Privacy and Security Research? (Extended Version)

In human factor fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and psychology, researchers have been concerned that participants mostly come from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries. This WEIRD skew may hinder understanding of diverse populations and their cultural differences. The usable privacy and security (UPS) field has inherited many research methodologies from research on human factor fields. We conducted a literature review to understand the extent to which participant samples in UPS papers were from WEIRD countries and the characteristics of the methodologies and research topics in each user study recruiting Western or non-Western participants. We found that the skew toward WEIRD countries in UPS is greater than that in HCI. Geographic and linguistic barriers in the study methods and recruitment methods may cause researchers to conduct user studies locally. In addition, many papers did not report participant demographics, which could hinder the replication of the reported studies, leading to low reproducibility. To improve geographic diversity, we provide the suggestions including facilitate replication studies, address geographic and linguistic issues of study/recruitment methods, and facilitate research on the topics for non-WEIRD populations.Comment: This paper is the extended version of the paper presented at USENIX SECURITY 202

Are chrome extensions compliant with the spirit of least privilege?

Extensions are small applications installed by users and enrich the user experience of browsing the Internet. Browsers expose a set of restricted APIs to extensions. To be used, extensions need to list the permissions associated with these APIs in a mandatory extension file named manifest. In particular, Chrome’s permission ecosystem was designed in the spirit of the least privilege. Yet, this paper demonstrates that 39.8% of the analyzed extensions provided by the official Web Store are compliant with the spirit of least privilege. Also, we develop: (1) a browser extension to make aware regular users of the permissions the extensions they install; (2) a web app where extensions developers can check whether their extensions are compliant with the spirit of the least privileged; and (3) a set of scripts that can be part of the vendors’ acceptance criteria such that when developers upload their extensions to the official repositories, the scripts automatically analyze the extensions and generate a report about the permissions and the usage

Understanding the Influencing Factors and Mechanism of Social Compensation for Chinese Older Adults Using Social Media in the Context of Smart Home: A Qualitative Analysis

As a new generation of necessary terminals for future homes, smart homes have become one of the essential mediums for smart aging at home. This paper aims to explore how older adults who age at home can overcome the digital divide of the new medium and achieve social participation in the home context to realize active aging. Based on the theory of social compensation, we select the smart-home smart screen, a representative new medium product in China, and carry out open coding, spindle coding, selective coding, and theoretical construction of the original interview data through the grounded theory research method. The results show that the main factors affecting the social compensation of older adults to smart home social media include user interface quality, interaction quality, content quality, and service quality, and these four factors are used as external variables to compensate older adults socially, thereby stimulating the emotional experience and perception changes at the cognitive level of older adults and then affecting the adoption and acceptance of smart home social media by older adults. This study refines the factors influencing the older adults' use of smart home social media from the perspective of social compensation. It explains the mechanism of acceptable behavior of older adults, bridging the gap in previous literature on the influencing factors and behavioral mechanisms of older adults of smart home social media. This paper provides a theoretical basis and guidance for the subsequent academic research and software development practice of social media under new technological devices to further help older adults in China achieve active and healthy aging

The user-centred intelligent environments development process as a guide to co-create smart technology for people with special needs

We report on the lessons learnt during the application of a methodology to develop Intelligent Environments. One important feature of the methodology is that of being strongly user-centred and we report on how that interaction with users took place and how it continuously shaped our project aspirations and outcomes. The methodology was applied to a project which aimed at helping people with Downs Syndrome and those with similar conditions and needs, to be more included in society. The project was developed by amconsortium of commercial, academic, and end-user supporting organizations. We explain what type of stakeholders engaging activities were considered, how these were distributed along the lifetime of the project and their impact

The user-centred intelligent environments development process as a guide to co-create smart technology for people with special needs

We report on the lessons learnt during the application of a methodology to develop Intelligent Environments. One important feature of the methodology is that of being strongly user-centred and we report on how that interaction with users took place and how it continuously shaped our project aspirations and outcomes. The methodology was applied to a project which aimed at helping people with Downs Syndrome and those with similar conditions and needs, to be more included in society. The project was developed by amconsortium of commercial, academic, and end-user supporting organizations. We explain what type of stakeholders engaging activities were considered, how these were distributed along the lifetime of the project and their impact