More Like this

1. Anon what what?: Children's Understanding of the Language of Privacy

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3311927.3325324  

   Black, Stacy; Joshaghani, Rezvan; Ratakonda, Dhanush kumar; Mehrpouyan, Hoda; Fails, Jerry Alan (June 2019, the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children)

   null (Ed.)

   Internet usage continues to increase among children ages 12 and younger. Because their digital interactions can be persistently stored, there is a need for building an understanding and foundational knowledge of privacy. We describe initial investigations into children's understanding of privacy from a Contextual Integrity (CI) perspective by conducting semi-structured interviews. We share results -- that echo what others have shown -- that indicate children have limited knowledge and understanding of CI principles. We also share an initial exploration of utilizing participatory design theater as a possible educational mechanism to help children develop a stronger understanding of important privacy principles 

   more » « less
2. What Epistemological Resources Affect Chemistry Teachers’ Sense of "What Worked"

   Schafer, AGL; Stowe, RL. (January 2021, 2021 NARST International Meeting)

   null (Ed.)

   Teachers’ sense of “what is taking place with respect to knowledge” drives their perspective on “what works” and “what is likely to work” in their classroom context. Scholarship by Hammer, Russ and many others indicates that this “sense” is very often context-sensitive and may be productively modeled as a local coalescence of small-grained epistemological resources. Presented here is an investigation of the epistemological resources contributing to high school chemistry teachers’ framing of “what works” in their learning environment. Teacher reflections are unpacked and characterized for classroom information noticed and responded to when considering “what worked” during the 2019-2020 school year. Preliminary findings suggest epistemological resources guiding “what worked” often align with a view of knowledge as propagated stuff. Thus, implying that teachers’ reasoning about “what works” is guided by how well knowledge is transferred to students. Also present was evidence that epistemological resources aligned to views of knowledge as fabricated stuff were activated. The perspective that knowledge is inferred or developed from other knowledge, rather than passed from an authority figure, aligns well with reform efforts that emphasize student sensemaking. This study is part of a larger program in which a teacher-researcher collaborative adapts and refines evidence-based curricular materials for an undergraduate chemistry course for use in high school. These materials are structured around scaffolded progressions of big ideas (e.g., energy, electrostatic and bonding interactions) that build in complexity as students make sense of increasingly complex phenomena. Ongoing improvement of transformed materials is dependent upon the ability to initiate and stabilize a sense of “what works” consistent with sensemaking aims. 

   more » « less
3. The Internet of Animals: what it is, what it could be

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2023.04.007  

   Kays, Roland; Wikelski, Martin (May 2023, Trends in Ecology & Evolution)
4. Are We Teaching What They Want? A Comparative Study of What AM Employers Want versus What AM Frameworks Require

   Jones, Faye R.; Mardis, Marcia A.; Pahuja, Divya (June 2019, ASEE annual conference & exposition)

   In this research paper, we compare Florida’s AM employer demands and academic requirements to state mandated AM curriculum guidelines. Florida is an AM leader, producing intermediate and finished products ranging from plastics to tortillas to motor vehicles. In total, Florida is home to over 20,000 AM companies employing over 320,000 workers. Florida is also geographically diverse, being simultaneously one of the most urban and one of the most rural highly populous states in the country. To characterize Florida’s AM employment needs, we analyzed 108 job postings from Florida employers who were seeking manufacturing and engineering technicians through publicly available job postings. Text mining was used to extract key knowledge areas (or topics) and verbs in these documents that AM employers identified in job postings and desired from their entry-level employees. We compared those topics and verbs to the ones found in the Florida Department of Education’s (FLDoE) AM curriculum framework for two-year programs. We found varying levels of alignment, and, in some instances, misalignment, between employers’ desired topics and competency levels and those found in FLDoE Frameworks. Our findings not only highlight the importance of industry-education partnerships to tailor preparation to employer needs, but also suggest that a deeper exploration and analysis of AM jobs is needed to further determine alignment to FLDoE frameworks. We conclude that the FLDoE framework may be used as a foundation, but not the sole source, for important AM knowledge areas, leaving opportunity for the development of an AM body of knowledge that reflects employer expectations and geographic variations. 

   more » « less
5. What is in #P and what is not?

   Ikenmeyer, Christian; Pak, Igor (October 2022, Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science)

   We prove that deciding the vanishing of the character of the symmetric group is C=P-complete. We use this hardness result to prove that the square of the character is not contained in #P, unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses to the second level. This rules out the existence of any (unsigned) combinatorial description for the square of the characters. As a byproduct of our proof we conclude that deciding positivity of the character is PP-complete under many-one reductions, and hence PH-hard under Turing-reductions. 

   more » « less