Alien Registration- Burnett, Margaret J. (Brownville, Piscataquis County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/10056/thumbnail.jp

Gender HCI Issues in End-User Software Engineering Environments

Although gender differences in a technological world are receiving significant research attention, much of the research and practice has aimed at how society and education can impact the successes and retention of female computer science professionals. The possibility of gender issues within software, however, has received almost no attention. We hypothesize that factors within software have a strong impact on how well female problem solvers can make use of the software. Evidence from other fields and investigations of our own have revealed evidence supporting this hypothesis

Diverse Humans and Human-AI Interaction: What Cognitive Style Disaggregation Reveals

Although guidelines for human-AI interaction (HAI) are providing important advice on how to help improve user experiences with AI products, little is known about HAI for diverse users' experiences with such systems. Without understanding how diverse users' experiences with AI products differ, designers lack information they need to make AI products that serve users equitably. To investigate, we disaggregated data from 1,016 human participants according to five cognitive styles -- their attitudes toward risk, their motivations, their learning styles (by process vs. by tinkering), their information processing styles, and their computer self-efficacy. Our results revealed situations in which applying existing HAI guidelines helped these cognitively diverse participants equitably, where applying them helped participants inequitably, and where stubborn inequity problems persisted despite applying the guidelines.The results also revealed that these situations pervaded across 15 of the 16 experiments; and also that they arose for all five of the cognitive style spectra. Finally, the results revealed what the cognitive style disaggregation's impacts were by participants' demographics -- showing statistical clusterings not only by gender, but also clusterings for intersectional gender-age groups

The Elusive Pursuit of Justice: Sexual Assault Survivors' Speak About Redress in the Aftermath of Violence

The struggle of survivors to obtain justice after they have been sexually assaulted has been a much discussed topic in recent years. Significant attention and resources are being directed towards this issue, making academic research particularly valuable at this time. However, instead of asking how legal processes can theoretically be made better, as is the case in most of the literature on this topic, my focus has been on asking why survivors want to engage in a legal process at all. What do they get from reporting their assaults and does what the legal system offers them respond to what survivors are looking for from justice? This project starts this conversation by asking survivors what they think justice should be in the aftermath of a sexual assault. Using feminist standpoint epistemology and grounded theory, I interviewed sixteen survivors and seven lawyers to explore what justice means for survivors in the aftermath of an assault. From the data, I identified four major themes including: harms and healing, accountability, punishment, and restorative justice. I found that survivors were not satisfied with the justice they could obtain under criminal law. They stated that it was difficult, financially and emotionally, to engage in criminal proceedings that were unlikely to resolve in a way that made them feel as if justice was done. While other forms of legal justice are also available, survivors often found these to be inaccessible as well, or they were unaware of the existence of these alternative options. The survivors I spoke with imagined an expansive ideal of justice. To most of the women I interviewed with, justice involved the prevention of future violence, something they did not think the legal system was currently equipped to deal with. They were curious, though conflicted, about restorative models, but appreciated their focus on attempting to reform offender behaviour. They also stressed the importance of being supported in their attempts to recover from sexual assault, highlighting that financial compensation was crucial for any survivor to heal

Conceptualising Early Career Teachers’ Agency and Accounts of Social Action in Disadvantaged Schools

This article examines the accounts of actions undertaken by Early Career Teachers (ECTs) recently graduated from a social justice-oriented Initial Teacher Education (ITE) program and employed in complex school settings with high levels of student diversity, disadvantage, and poverty. The study drew on theories of teacher agency and agency more broadly to examine the workshadowing observations of the teachers’ practice in classrooms augmented by their reflective accounts in interviews. The study found that the ECTs’ agency, or contextualised social action, can be conceptualised as temporally embedded social engagement directed at addressing their students’ cultural, social and academic needs. The teachers drew on past learnings from their ITE program, committed to future-oriented innovations in teaching, and made in-the-present decisions about actions to resolve emergent contingencies such as resource shortages. We argue that these understandings are usefully enhanced by recognising contingency, consciousness, criticality and creativity as additional features of the teachers’ deliberative programs of action