Group Assignment

Groups of 4-5 students are given a topic. They must identify a product and research and design it

What\u27s in a Name?”: The Use of Instructional Design in Overcoming Terminology Barriers Associated with Dark Patterns

Many users experience a phenomena when they are shopping on-line where they feel they are being pressured to either spend more money than they had intended, or to share more personal data than they wanted. In academic circles we use the term “Dark Patterns” to describe these deceptive practices, and categorize them as being within the discipline of User Experience (Narayanan, 2020). As academics it is important to name phenomena, and to categorize them, so that we can discuss and analyze these issues. However, this particular topic is one that all users should be made aware of when interacting online, and therefore these ideas should be explained in a manner to ensure that the terminology does not prove to be a barrier to understanding these concepts (Gordon, et al., 2014). To overcome the terminological barriers, this research proposes the use of a model of instructional design called Elaboration Theory, developed by Charles Reigeluth (1999). Crucially this model proposes that when explaining a new concept, the last thing the instructor should do is to mention the name of the concept, they should first explain the concept, and at the very end of an instructional session, say “And by the way, this concept is called…”. This model also contends that the instructor should explain the concept in simple terms first, and then continue to elaborate on that explanation throughout the teaching process (adhering to the notion of a Spiral Curriculum). It also suggests that the content should be summarized at each level of explanation, and analogies should be used to help clarify concepts. Therefore, this research proposes the redevelopment of existing teaching content about Dark Patterns, where these patterns are retitled as “Online Shopping Tricks”, and the teaching content is redesigned to begin with a simple explanation of Dark Patterns and to elaborate with more complexity at a number of levels of explanation, and including summarizers and analogies at the end of each stage. This content will be subsequently piloted on a number of non-academic participants to determine whether or not this redesign process has been effective

Homo Ludens Moralis: Designing and Developing a Board Game to Teach Ethics for ICT Education

The ICT ethical landscape is changing at an astonishing rate, as technologies become more complex, and people choose to interact with them in new and distinct ways, the resultant interactions are more novel and less easy to categorise using traditional ethical frameworks. It is vitally important that the developers of these technologies do not live in an ethical vacuum; that they think about the uses and abuses of their creations, and take some measures to prevent others being harmed by their work. To equip these developers to rise to this challenge and to create a positive future for the use of technology, it important that ethics becomes a central element of the education of designers and developers of ICT systems and applications. To this end a number of third-level institutes across Europe are collaborating to develop educational content that is both based on pedagogically sound principles, and motivated by international exemplars of best practice. One specific development that is being undertaken is the creation of a series of ethics cards, which can be used as standalone educational prop, or as part of a board game to help ICT students learn about ethics. The history of using games for educational purposes is both extensive and diverse; and current literature most often associates it with the term “Gamification”, which Deterding et al. (2011) defines as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts , this can include things such as; using a points systems, awarding badges, or completing levels, as a form of motivation and incentive (Flatla et al., 2011). A meta-analysis of results by Hamari et al. (2014) suggests that gamification can increase motivation, attitude and enjoyment of tasks, however Seaborn and Fels (2015) caution that much of the research that purports to be Gamification-based is in fact not grounded in theory and does not use gamification frameworks in the design of the systems under study. Nonetheless they found that those studies that did adhere to a good theoretical framework did show improvement in motivation, particularly extrinsic motivation. Groh (2012) notes that gamified applications have been developed across different domains such as productivity, finance, health, education, sustainability as well as news and entertainment media. He also notes that the traditional view of gamification excludes the creation of an actual game, which he classifies as a “Serious Game”, a term which arose in 2002 with the emergence of the Serious Games Initiative (seriousgames.org). Seaborn and Fels (2015) support this distinction of gamification, which they define it as the “incorporation of game elements into an interactive system without a fully-fledged game as the end product”, but highlight that other researchers have a less restrictive perspective, and note that Kapp (2012) and others see serious games as being a subset of gamification rather than being antithetical to it. Although the literature of gamification only commences in the 2000s, the notion of using elements of games for education, and specifically using concrete “playful” objects to illustrate abstract concepts has existed for centuries. In the context of childhood education, in 1693 Enlightenment philosopher, John Locke proposed the idea of Alphabet Blocks, saying “There may be dice and play-things, with the letters on them to teach children the alphabet by playing” in his thesis “Some Thoughts Concerning Education”. The work of both French educator Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont in the 1750s and British cartographer John Spilsbury in the 1760s led to the development of the Jigsaw (also called at the time the Dissected Map), created as an educational tool to teach geography to children. German educator Friedrich Froebel who is renowned for creating the first kindergarten, also developed a group of “play materials” including a collection of blocks of solid geometrical shapes, and a set of foldable materials such as paper. These are now called Froebel\u27s Gifts, and their creation in the mid-19th century is recognised as a seminal moment in education, for their use in effectively stimulating all five senses of a wide range of learners. These led to later developments, such as Meccano in 1907, the Erector Set in 1913, and Lego in 1958 (Zuckerman, 2006). In a similar vein, the military have long used serious games to help teach strategy for thousands of years, the most obvious example being chess, originating from at least the 15th century, but there were many predecessors to the game of chess that had a similar purpose, including the Indian game, Chaturanga, from the 6th century, and the Chinese game Yì (or Weiqi) from around 600 BCE (Smith, 2010). Starting in the 17th century there were versions of chess that begin to evolve towards modern strategic wargames, including in Germany: in 1616 Das Schack-oder Koenig-Spiel, in 1644 Neu-erfundenes grosses Koenig-Spiel, in 1780 (featuring a board with 1,666 squares) Koenigspiel, and in 1812 Kriegsspiel (Vego, 2012). These developments eventually led to science fiction author, H.G. Wells writing “Little Wars” a book codifying the rules for miniature wargaming (Wells, 1913). This in turn led to the first commercial board wargames, including early examples such as Tactics in 1954, and Gettysburg in 1958 (Deterding, 2009). The use of games in teaching ethics and ethics-related topics is not new, Brandt and Messeter (2004) created a range of games to help teach students about topics related to design (with a focus on ethical issues), and concluded that the games serve to as a way to structure conversations around the topic, and enhance collaboration. Halskov and Dalsgård (2006), who also created games for design concurred with the previous researchers, and also noted that the games helped with the level of innovation and production of the students. Lucero and Arrasvuori (2010) created a series of cards and scenarios to use them in, and had similar conclusions to the previous research, but also noted that this approach can be used in multiple stages of a design process, including the analysis of requirements stage, the idea development stage, and the evaluation stage. Bochennek, et al. (2007) reviewed a wide range of card games and board games that focus on medical education (with many concerning medical ethics) and concluded that although games are used widely in this discipline, there has nonetheless been insufficient evaluation of the efficacy of these games, with many simply evaluated based on individuals’ opinions, rather than measuring their efficacy as teaching tools. They also reflected that some games are more boring than others, and as such this reduces the likelihood of the game being replayed, and reduces the likelihood of knowledge transfer. Lloyd and Van De Poel (2008) created a game to teach ethics where the students were given opportunity to reflect on their own perspectives and experiences, to help structure their own ethical framework. The game also involved aspects of role-play as the researchers indicated that they thought it was important that the students “felt” ethics as well as experienced them. The aim of our work is to develop educational content for teaching ICT content. In this paper we present the development of a series of ethics cards to help ICT students learn about ethical dilemmas. The development of ethics cards has followed a Design Science methodology (Hevner et al., 2004) in creating the board game these guidelines were expanded into a full methodology that is both iterative and cyclical by Peffers et al. (2007). Our project is currently in the third stage of this methodology, called the “Design & Development” stage, but the process is evolving as the cards are being designing to act as independent teaching materials that can but used in the classroom, as well as part of the board game. A sample set of cards are presented below. The cards can be used independently in the classroom, for example, a student can be asked to pick a random Scenario Card, read it out to the class, and have the students do a Think-Pair-Share activity. This is where the students first reflect individually on the scenario, then in pairs, and finally share with the class. Following this a Modifier Card can be selected, of which there are two kinds, (1) modifications that make the scenario worse for others if the student doesn’t agree to do the task on the Scenario Card, and (2) modifications that make the scenario better for others if the student does agree to do the task. This should generate a great deal of conversation and reflection on whether doing a small “bad task” is justifiable if there is a greater good at stake. The cards can also be used in the board game where the players have a combination of Virtue, Accountability, and Loyalty points, which are impacted by both the Scenario Cards and the Modifier Cards. It is worth noting that some modifiers result in points being added on, others subtracted, and others multiplied to the players’ global scores. Overall the goal of this project is not simply to design a game to help teach ethics, but rather to explore how effective design science methodologies are in helping in the design of such a game. KEYWORDS: Digital Ethics; Card Games; Board Games; Design Science REFERENCES Bochennek, K., Wittekindt, B., Zimmermann, S.Y. and Klingebiel, T. (2007) “More than Mere Games: A Review of Card and Board Games for Medical Education”, Medical Teacher, 29(9-10), pp.941-948. Brandt, E. and Messeter, J. (2004) “Facilitating Collaboration through Design Games”. In Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Participatory Design: Artful Integration: Interweaving Media, Materials and Practices, 1, pp. 121-131, ACM. Deterding, S. (2009) “Living Room Wars” in Hunteman, N.B., Payne, M.T., Joystick Soldiers Routledge, pp.21-38. Deterding, S., Khaled, R., Nacke, L.E. and Dixon, D. (2011) “Gamification: Toward a Definition”, CHI 2011 Gamification Workshop Proceedings (Vol. 12). Vancouver BC, Canada. Flatla, D.R., Gutwin, C., Nacke, L.E., Bateman, S. and Mandryk, R.L. (2011) “Calibration Games: Making Calibration Tasks Enjoyable by Adding Motivating Game Elements”, in Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (pp. 403-412). ACM. Halskov, K. and Dalsgård, P. (2006) “Inspiration Card Workshops” In Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, pp. 2-11, ACM. Hamari, J., Koivisto, J. and Sarsa, H. (2014) “Does Gamification Work? A Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Gamification”, in Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 14(2014), pp. 3025-3034. Hevner, A.R., March, S.T., Park, J. and Ram, S. (2004) “Design Science in Information Systems Research”, Management Information Systems Quarterly, 28(1), p.6. Kapp, K.M. (2012) The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education. Pfeiffer; San Francisco, CA. Lloyd, P. and Van De Poel, I. (2008) “Designing Games to Teach Ethics”, Science and Engineering Ethics, 14(3), pp.433-447. Lucero, A. and Arrasvuori, J. (2010) “PLEX Cards: A Source of Inspiration when Designing for Playfulness”, In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Fun and Games, 1, pp. 28-37, ACM. Peffers, K., Tuunanen, T., Rothenberger, M.A. and Chatterjee, S. (2007) “A Design Science Research Methodology for Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, 24(3), pp.45-77. Seaborn, K. and Fels, D.I. (2015) “Gamification in Theory and Action: A Survey”, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 74, pp.14-31. Smith, R. (2010) “The Long History of Gaming in Military Training”, Simulation & Gaming, 41(1), pp.6-19. Wells, H.G. (1913) Little Wars. London: Palmer. Vego, M. (2012) “German War Gaming”, Naval War College Review, 65(4), pp.106-148. Zuckerman, O (2006) “Historical Overview and Classification of Traditional and Digital Learning Objects”, MIT Media Lab

Is Twitter a bad place? The responsibility that social media may have had in the 2021 storming of Capitol Hill.

The events of 6 th January 2021 in the United States of America, where rioters stormed the heart of their democracy, the US Capitol Complex (which houses their bicameral parliament) were shocking to see. The reasons for this riot were myriad, including to protest the outcomes of the presidential elections and two senate elections, as well as to prevent the counting that day of the electoral votes that formally certify the election result. These events will be analysed and reflected upon for years to come, and blame will be placed at many people’s doors, and inevitability one that has already been singled out is social media. As Irish-born CNN reporter Donie O\u27Sullivan said during the event: “In 2016 people tried to write of anything about social media, saying oh, it\u27s only a few Facebook posts, what harm? Here\u27s the harm. The harm of conspiracy theories, the harm of people living in these online and Trump media echo chambers.” And now questions are being asked of social media, including Facebook and Twitter, the primary communication media of President Donald Trump

A Framework of Web-Based Dark Patterns that can be Detected Manually or Automatically

This research explores the design and development of a framework for the detection of Dark Patterns, which are a series of user interface tricks that manipulate users into actions that they do not intend to do, for example, share more data than they want to, or spend more money than they plan to. The interface does this using either deception or other psychological nudges. User Interface experts have categorized a number of these tricks that are commonly used and have called them Dark Patterns. They are typically varied in their form and what they do, and the goal of this research is to explore existing research into these patterns, and to design and develop a framework for automated detection of potential instances of web-based dark patterns. To achieve this, we explore each of the many canonical dark patterns and identify whether or not it is technically possible to automatically detect that particular pattern. Some patterns are easier to detect than others, and there are others that are impossible to detect in an automated fashion. For example, some patterns are straightforward and use confusing terminology to flummox the users, e.g. “Click here if you do not wish to opt out of our mailing list”, and these are reasonably simple to detect, whereas others, for example, sites that prevent users from doing a price comparison with similar products might not be readily detectable. This paper presents a framework to automatically detect dark patterns. We present and analyze known dark patterns in terms of whether they can be either: (1) detected in an automated way (it can be partially or fully), (2) detected in a manual way (it can be partially or fully) and (3) cannot be detected at all. We present the results of our analysis and outline a proposed software tool to detect dark patterns on websites, social media platforms and mobile applications

The Design of a Framework for the Detection of Web-Based Dark Patterns

In the theories of User Interfaces (UI) and User Experience (UX), the goal is generally to help understand the needs of users and how software can be best configured to optimize how the users can interact with it by removing any unnecessary barriers. However, some systems are designed to make people unwillingly agree to share more data than they intend to, or to spend more money than they plan to, using deception or other psychological nudges. User Interface experts have categorized a number of these tricks that are commonly used and have called them Dark Patterns. Dark Patterns are varied in their form and what they do, and the goal of this research is to design and develop a framework for automated detection of potential instances of web-based dark patterns. To achieve this we explore each of the many canonical dark patterns and identify whether or not it is technically possible to automatically detect that particular pattern. Some patterns are easier to detect than others, and there others that are impossible to detect in an automated fashion. For example, some patterns are straightforward and use confusing terminology to flummox the users, e.g. “Click here if you do not wish to opt out of our mailing list”, and these are reasonably simple to detect, whereas others, for example, sites that prevent users from doing a price comparison with similar products might not be readily detectable. This paper presents a framework to automatically detect dark patterns. We present and analyze known dark patterns in terms of whether they can be: (1) detected in an automated way (either partially or fully), (2) detected in a manual way (either partially or fully) and (3) cannot be detected at all. We present the results of our analysis and outline a proposed software tool to detect dark patterns on websites, social media platforms and mobile applications

“YOU MUST HAVE YOUR WEBCAM ON FOR THE ENTIRE DURATION OF THE EXAMINATION”: THE TRADE-OFF BETWEEN THE INTEGRITY OF ON-LINE ASSESSMENTS AND THE PRIVACY RIGHTS OF STUDENTS

The impact of COVID-19 has been widespread and far-reaching, and one domain that has experienced severe disruption is the university education sector, where the entire apparatus of teaching and assessment for many programmes of study had to move on-line in a matter of days. This was accomplished notably through enormous co-operation between staff and students in educational institutions (Adnan and Anwar, 2020). The negative economic impacts of COVID-19 on university students has been highlighted in terms of poor access to online resources, delayed graduation and lost internships with this effect felt more keenly by students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Aucejo, 2020). However, an issue that has been less reported is how the crisis highlighted mismatches between on the one hand the regulations and requirements of the educational institutions, and on the other hand the privacy rights (and needs) of the students. In this research we are investigating the challenges associated with the potential for students and teachers to inadvertently share aspects of their private lives as part of on-line teaching and assessment, as well as the ethical challenges of monitoring students during exams. Some educational institutes have used software for monitoring students during assessments (called e-Proctoring systems), and these systems lead to a range of potential ethical concerns, particularly if the systems employ facial recognition systems and/or artificial intelligence systems to detect potential malfeasance. One voice that hasn’t been included in this discussion heretofore is the student voice, so this research includes the design and development of the WebCam Usage Student Survey (WUSS), and a group of computer science students (N=44) were asked for their opinions on a wide range of privacy issues (as these student have some idea on the potential pitfalls of using theses types of technologies). Their views are varied and nuanced, and their perspective in combination with the literature will be used to develop a series of guidelines for both general webcam usage, as well as for the use of e-Proctoring systems. This issue is one of a rapidly growing number of computer ethics issues that have been emerging recently, to such an extent that a number of third-level institutes across Europe are collaborating to explore some of these key ethical challenges, and to develop educational content that is both based on pedagogically sound principles, and motivated by international exemplars of best practice to highlight these matters as part of the Erasmus+ Ethics4EU project (O’Sullivan and Gordon, 2020)

Ethics4eu: Designing New Curricula For Computer Science Ethics Education: Case Studies For Ai Ethics

The computing ethics landscape is changing rapidly, as new technologies become more complex and pervasive, and people choose to interact with them in new and distinct ways. The resultant interactions are more novel and less easy to categorise using traditional ethical frameworks. It is important that developers of these technologies do not live in an ethical vacuum, that they think about the consequences of their creations, and take measures to prevent others being harmed by their work. To equip developers to rise to this challenge and create a positive future for the use of technology, it important that ethics becomes a central element of computer science education. To this end, the Ethics4EU project has developed curricula on a wide range of topics including privacy and agency of personal information, digital literacy, data governance and accountability, surveillance applications, algorithmic decision and automating human intelligence for robotics and autonomous vehicles. Crucially the content examines computing ethics, not only in terms of hardware and software, but how systems, people, organisations and society interact with technology.In this paper, we present our interdisciplinary approach to developing educational content for AI Ethics. This includes accessible teaching materials, in-class activities, sample assessments, practical guidelines and instructor guides. We discuss findings of an evaluation of the developed content with undergraduate computer science students

You Can\u27t Lose a Game If You Don\u27t Play the Game: Exploring the Ethics of Gamification in Education

Gamification has been hailed as a meaningful solution to the perennial challenge of sustaining student attention in class. It uses facets of gameplay in an educational context, including things such as points, leaderboards and badges. These are clearly efforts to make the student experience more entertaining and engaging, but nonetheless, they are also clearly digital nudges and attempts to change the students’ behaviours and attitudes to a specific set of concepts, and in which case they must, and should, be subject to the same ethical scrutiny as any other form of persuasion technique, as they may be unintentionally eroding the choices that students feel they have. This research therefore discusses some of the key ethical considerations and concerns associated with gamification, and presents a new framework that incorporates ethical tests into each stage of a pre-existing model of instructional design, that can be used when introducing gamification into an educational process