Ethics in the Details : Communicating Engineering Ethics via Micro-Insertion

Work is described on a National Science Foundation grant that supports the development, assessment, and dissemination of “micro-insertion” problems designed to integrate ethics into the graduate engineering curriculum. In contrast to traditional modular approaches to ethics pedagogy, micro-insertions introduce ethical issues by means of a “low-dose” approach. Following a description of the micro-insertion approach, we outline the workshop structure being used to teach engineering faculty and graduate students how to write micro-insertions for graduate engineering courses, with particular attention to how the grant develops engineering students’ (and faculty members’) ability to communicate across disciplinary boundaries. We also describe previous and planned methods for assessing the effectiveness of micro-insertions. Finally, we explain the role that technical communication faculty and graduate students are playing as part of the grant team, specifically in developing an Ethics In-Basket that will disseminate micro-insertions developed during the grant.IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications Vol. 52, Issue 1, pp. 95-108

TOWARD THE DEVELOPMENT OF USABILITY GUIDELINES FOR SINGLE-WINDOW WEB INTERFACES

Since the early 1990s, usability research has guided development of web interfaces used to interact with content available on the Internet. Following these guidelines has resulted in web pages that in many characteristics are quite similar and are identified here as Conventional Web Interfaces (CWIs). An emergent genre of web interface, the Single Window Interface (SWI), differs in many ways from CWIs. Most importantly, SWIs differ from CWIs in the type of tasks expected of their users and in the visual strategies used to facilitate these tasks. Namely, SWIs facilitate open-ended discovery tasks by using strong visual cues to convey meta-information to the user and encourage both the exploration and perusal of content. This dissertation will demonstrate that the differences between SWIs and CWIs require revisiting current usability guidelines in order to determine how to guide future development of SWIs. If SWI visual strategies can be shown to be effective in conveying meta-information qualities to users, the groundwork will be prepared for future research investigating the effectiveness of these strategies in facilitating open-ended exploration and discovery within SWIs. These efforts will lead to more useful experiences for users of SWIs and inform the fields of technical communication as well as human-computer interaction and usability research, to name just a few of the affected fields of study.PH.D in Technical Communication, May 201

Evaluation of a Design for Concurrent Error Detection and Testability

Semiconductor Research Corporation / 93-DP-109Ope

Evaluation of a Design Concurrent Error Detection and Testability

Coordinated Science Laboratory was formerly known as Control Systems Laboratory93-DP-109U of I OnlyRestricted to UIUC communit

Evaluation of a Design Concurrent Error Detection and Testability

Coordinated Science Laboratory was formerly known as Control Systems Laboratory93-DP-109U of I OnlyRestricted to UIUC communit

Evaluation of a Design for Concurrent Error Detection and Testability

Semiconductor Research Corporation / 93-DP-109Ope

Proposal for DHCS 2007 A Featural Analysis of Collaborative and Dynamic Web Interfaces

Increasingly, collaborative Web interfaces such as those compiled at www.infosthetics.com use dynamic graphical user interfaces (GUIs), displaying information through nonlinearity (e.g., allowing users to choose their own paths), iconicity (e.g., displaying a map instead of a list of countries ’ names), and other novel, sophisticated visual strategies. While dynamic GUIs are currently more prevalent in social networking sites (e.g., digg.com), their growth suggests that they are of potential interest to academic communities who seek to facilitate and represent the collaborative construction of information. And, indeed, dynamic GUIs are gaining ground in more academically oriented sites (e.g., BBC history www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/launch_tl_british.shtml; Superfund 36