Monthly Archives: December 2017

Professor Mark Aims to Reduce Workplace Stress

December 22, 2017

Informatics Professor Gloria Mark has received funding from a National Science Foundation Cyber-Human Systems (NSF CHS) grant to study methods to detect and address workplace stress. The $1.2 million grant, “Managing Stress in the Workplace: Unobtrusive Monitoring and Adaptive Interventions,” with Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna of Texas A&M University and Ioannis Pavlidis of the University of Houston, runs through July 2020. Mark’s share of the funding is $420,000.
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Motherboard: “The Reddit Moderator Getting a PhD in Online Moderation” (PhD student Kat Lo profiled)

December 13, 2017

Much of the internet runs on volunteer labor performed by people who are often unnoticed, such as online community moderators. When these people are recognized, it’s usually because they’ve become a target of harassment, are involved in a flamewar, or are accused of abusing their power.
Moderators make message boards, Reddit, Facebook groups, email listservs, and many other online communities function, and yet not a whole lot of time has been spent by mainstream academics understanding good internet moderation, or the psyche of a moderator. Kat Lo, a PhD student at the University of California Irvine, is bridging that gap by researching online communities at a time when most major platforms are trying reckon with widespread harassment.

Read the full story at Motherboard.

Michigan Virtual Learning Research Institute (MVLRI) interview with Mimi Ito

December 6, 2017

In this episode, we’re joined by two researchers affiliated with the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub – Mimi Ito from UC Irvine and Justin Reich from MIT. First we’ll get acquainted with their work more generally and learn about the unique research topics they’re pursuing at their respective institutions. Then, we talk extensively about a recent publication that they authored that was published through the Hub, called From Good Intentions to Real Outcomes: Equity by Design in Learning Technologies. We talk about the process of producing this report, including convening stakeholders from many different organizations involved in education technology and online learning, and the challenges and strategies identified with regard to equitable use of learning technologies in K-12 settings.

Listen to the episode on SoundCloud.