Current Researchers: David Nguyen, Alex Bretana, and Gillian Hayes

Past Collaborators: Gabriela Marcu, Brian Sone, Aurora Bedford, Gillian Hayes, Khai Truong (University of Toronto), James Scott (Microsoft Research), and Marc Langheinrich (ETH Zurich)

Project: Tools for electronic recording have become easier to use, less expensive, and more pervasive in recent years. As a result, just when people think they understand a technology enough to react to it – avoiding or embracing it – new technologies are invented and deployed, making it nearly impossible for even the most technologically savvy to keep up.

During design and initial product introduction, many different stakeholders make important choices that affect the ways in which these technologies might be perceived, used, and sometimes rejected. However, no matter what choices these stakeholders make, those people destined to encounter these technologies still choose to reject, live with, or appropriate these technologies based on their own understanding of them. Knowledge of how people make decisions about recording technologies based in both technical and social influences is critically missing today. This project contributes to ongoing research in privacy and security, ubiquitous computing, and technology and policy studies.

This work is supported in part by the collaboration with Microsoft Research Cambridge.

A recent paper from this work will be presented at Ubicomp 2008:
An Empirical Investigation of Concerns of Everyday Tracking and Recording Technologies
David H. Nguyen
Alfred Kobsa
Gillian R. Hayes

Youth are faced with complex choices about whether and how to share personal information online and offline. To inform these decisions, students need meaningful experiences with managing personal information and the technologies that are becoming central in everyday life.

We will create an interactive exhibit called “Identity Detectives” through which children (K-6) will construct knowledge about personal information to encourage “safe, legal, and responsible use of information and technology” (www.iste.org).

We hope to install this exhibit at a location like the Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, California. This museum—founded to provide “hands-on” learning experiences involving science, math, and technology—holds over 100 interactive exhibits, where visitors learn about myriad scientific concepts. Students of all ages engage with exhibits and construct meaning about scientific concepts along with families and school groups.

The center is an ideal site for a new technology-driven exhibit. Many exhibits already contain novel technologies to support interactions necessary for in-depth learning about science. However, exhibits about technology are not as prevalent.

To build conceptual understanding of personal information, students will:
• Recognize biological and cultural identifiers
• Explore how identity makes each person unique and a community diverse

To learn about privacy and security in technology, students will:
• Engage with online information solicitation
• Interact with tracking and recording technologies (e.g., RFID, biometrics, bar codes)

The exhibit provides students opportunities to establish respect for personal information—the foundation for responsible, informed sharing. Combining technological knowledge and character-building activities, this experience is an alternative to the reactionary stance usually taken toward perceived and actual risk to youth safety.

This work enables evaluation of new immersive, tactile, and collaborative learning experiences. The proposed exhibit will strengthen understanding of the interactions students have with materials, peers, and educators in a constructivist environment. Findings from this work will influence the design of learning technologies to reflect, support and strengthen these interactions.

Please comment on our work at the MacArthur Digital Learning competition http://www.dmlcompetition.net/pligg/story.php?title=544#c1037