“Dare to be Stupid” Covering “Weird Al” Yankovic

Though Weirdrow Album Yankeeverse would be a believable birth name, Albert Matthew “Weird Al” Yankovic earned his moniker. One of pop music’s most accomplished accordionists, Al has earned four Grammys, amassed four gold and six platinum records, and may have sung more songs about food than all artists of the rock era combined. This chapter is an attempt to understand the minds and muses of Yankovic. To do so, the author attempts a parody cover of Will Brooker’s Being Bowie. For one year, Brooker dressed, ate, sang, and generally lived as much like Bowie as he could. Whereas it took Brooker a year to cycle through Bowie’s protean manifestations, “Weird Al” has been singular in his aesthetic and technique his entire four-decade-plus career, so it took this author only a few days of generally living like “Weird Al” to achieve the desired immersive effect

Signs of Popular Ecology in the Ecotourism Landscape Near Tikal National Park, Guatemala

Ecotourism is a common conservation and development strategy in the Maya, Forest region. New sites of ecotourism consumption, such as El Rematé near Tikal National Park in Guatemala, are developing in response to consumer demand for budget accommodations in this attractive cultural and natural setting. This study analyzes new ecotourism infrastructure developments in El Rematé for signs that this tourism draws on ecological imagery as expressed in popular media - or popular ecology - not on the natural and cultural ecology of the region that is the target of international conservation efforts. Analysis suggests that ecotourism entrepreneurs who effectively associate their product with texts of popular ecology will out-compete the community ecotourism projects supported by the non-governmental organizations managing the Biosphere Reserves in the region, challenging the success of international conservation and development strategies

Securing the Next Generation

Weak authentication practices that rely on passwords for security have led to widespread data breaches and successful phishing attacks. Recent advances in the cost and usability of hardware security tokens have made the prospect of effectively augmenting password-based authentication or removing it altogether a possibility. To actualize this, a paradigm change in how people learn to authenticate accounts on-line must occur. Towards this end, we describe a curriculum to teach high-school students the perils of passwords and a program to distribute hardware security tokens to them as they are first setting up their on-line presence in order to improve the security of the next generation

Modify and Adjust: Senior Inquiry as a Transformative Whole-School Program for Race and Social Justice

Senior Inquiry is a dual-credit bridge program partnership between University Studies and regional school districts. The partnerships with Portland Public Schools have prioritized serving first-generation students and other underserved populations. As the program has grown, equity concerns among the collaborative teaching teams prompted experimenting with a whole-school model at Jefferson High School Middle College for Advanced Studies while working within the frame of the course theme of Race and Social Justice. This article documents how the Jefferson Senior Inquiry team attempts to authentically address the accumulated systemic inequities encountered by students in our classrooms. Student-centered pedagogy must be modified and adjusted to meet students where they are. Using the example of a summer assignment and engagement with visionary fiction, we show how we implement the inquiry model with our collaborative and iterative planning

CyberPDX: An Interdisciplinary Professional Development Program for Middle and High School Teachers

CyberPDX is an annual professional development program hosted at Portland State University. Our long-term goal is to broaden participation in cybersecurity. Since 2016, over 70 middle and high school teachers from the Pacific Northwest have participated in the STREAM program, which offers interdisciplinary instruction in programming, cryptography, personal security, policy, literature, and arts. In this poster, we share our interdisciplinary curriculum, present data on short-term impacts, and describe our in-progress work to evaluate the program’s longer term impacts

CyberPDX: A Camp for Broadening Participation in Cybersecurity

With society’s increasing dependence on technology infrastructure, the importance of securing the computers, networks, data, and algorithms that run our digital and physical lives is becoming critical. To equip the next generation of citizens for the challenges ahead, an effort is underway to introduce security content early in a student’s academic career. It is important that these efforts broaden participation and increase diversity in the field. While many camps and curricula focus on introducing technical content and skills related to cybersecurity, such approaches can prematurely limit how students view career opportunities in the field, potentially limiting those who ultimately pursue it. In addition, it is likely that many problems in cybersecurity can only be addressed in an interdisciplinary manner by those trained in the arts and humanities as well as in technical fields [1]. This paper describes CyberPDX, a residential summer camp that introduces cybersecurity to high school students. Key to CyberPDX is its focus on the range of societal issues that will be impacted by cybersecurity as well as its coverage of the breadth of roles that students can play to help address them. Through four learning threads taught by faculty in Computer Science, Sociology, and Film Studies, the CyberPDX curriculum spans topics from constitutional law, cyberpolicy, ethics, and filmmaking to programming, cryptography, security, and privacy in order to show students how broad cybersecurity issues are and the many ways they can participate in helping to solve them

University Studies Annual Assessment 2017-2018

Annual in-depth examination and assessment of Portland State University\u27s general education model, the University Studies Program. The tools and methods used to assess student learning are faculty driven and developed