Browsing by Author "Voida, Amy"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    ACTIVE READING ON TABLET TEXTBOOKS
    (2015-04-17) Palilonis, Jennifer Ann; Defazio, Joseph; Bolchini, Davide; Butler, Darrell; Voida, Amy
    To study a text, learners often engage in active reading. Through active reading, learners build an analysis by annotating, outlining, summarizing, reorganizing and synthesizing information. These strategies serve a fundamental meta-cognitive function that allows content to leave strong memory traces and helps learners reflect, understand, and recall information. Textbooks, however, are becoming more complex as new technologies change how they are designed and delivered. Interactive, touch-screen tablets offer multi-touch interaction, annotation features, and multimedia content as a browse-able book. Yet, such tablet textbooks-in spite of their increasing availability in educational settings-have received little empirical scrutiny regarding how they support and engender active reading. To address this issue, this dissertation reports on a series of studies designed to further our understanding of active reading with tablet textbooks. An exploratory study first examined strategies learners enact when reading and annotating in the tablet environment. Findings indicate learners are often distracted by touch screen mechanics, struggle to effectively annotate information delivered in audiovisuals, and labor to cognitively make connections between annotations and the content/media source from which they originated. These results inspired SMART Note, a suite of novel multimedia annotation tools for tablet textbooks designed to support active reading by: minimizing interaction mechanics during active reading, providing robust annotation for multimedia, and improving built-in study tools. The system was iteratively developed through several rounds of usability and user experience evaluation. A comparative experiment found that SMART Note outperformed tablet annotation features on the market in terms of supporting learning experience, process, and outcomes. Together these studies served to extend the active reading framework for tablet textbooks to: (a) recognize the tension between active reading and mechanical interaction; (b) provide designs that facilitate cognitive connections between annotations and media formats; and (c) offer opportunities for personalization and meaningful reorganization of learning material.
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    Data-Driven Accountability: Examining and Reorienting the Mythologies of Data
    (2020-05) Verma, Nitya; Dombrowski, Lynn; Bolchini, Davide; Young, Alyson; Seybold, Peter; Voida, Amy; Muller, Michael
    In this work, I examine and design sociotechnical interventions for addressing limitations around data-driven accountability, particularly focusing on politically contentious and systemic social issues (i.e., police accountability). While organizations across sectors of society are scrambling to adopt data-driven technologies and practices, there are epistemological and ethical concerns around how data use influences decisionmaking and actionability. My work explores how stakeholders adopt and handle the challenges around being data-driven, advocating for ways HCI can mitigate such challenges. In this dissertation, I highlight three case studies that focus on data-driven, human-services organizations, which work with at-risk and marginalized populations. First, I examine the tools and practices of nonprofit workers and how they experience the mythologies associated with data use in their work. Second, I investigate how police officers are adopting data-driven technologies and practices, which highlights the challenges police contend with in addressing social criticisms around police accountability and marginalization. Finally, I conducted a case study with multiple stakeholders around police accountability to understand how systemic biases and politically charged spaces perceive and utilize data, as well as to develop the design space around how alternative futures of being data-driven could support more robust and inclusive accountability. I examine how participants situate the concepts of power, bias, and truth in the data-driven practices and technologies used by and around the police. With this empirical work, I present insights that inform the HCI community at the intersection of data design, practice, and policies in addressing systemic social issues.
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    Designing Against the Status Quo
    (ACM, 2018) Khovanskaya, Vera; Dombrowski, Lynn; Harmon, Ellie; Korn, Matthias; Light, Ann; Stewart, Michael; Voida, Amy; Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing
    Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction design field as a whole.
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    A Multi-Stakeholder Perspective on Social Media Use by Nonprofit Organizations: Towards a Culture of Dialogue
    (2018-11) Li, Yannan; Voida, Amy; Benjamin, Lehn M.; Burlingame, Dwight F.; Shaker, Genevieve G.; Parrish-Sprowl, John
    Previous empirical studies of social media use by nonprofit organizations suggest that its dialogic potential has not yet been fully realized. Yet drawing from content analysis and surveys, these studies shed little light on the underlying motives and values that drive nonprofit social media practices, neither do they address to what extent these practices are effective on social media followers. To fill in the gaps of this existing research, I conducted two qualitative studies to explore the experiences of multiple stakeholders implicated in nonprofit social media use. First, I interviewed social media point persons (SMPPs)—nonprofit employees who self-identified as being primarily responsible for their organization’s social media planning and implementation—and found that SMPPs’ mindsets and social media tactics reflect dialogic principles, specifically those of mutuality, empathy, propinquity, risk and commitment. Second, I conducted focus groups with individuals who followed some of the SMPPs’ organizations on Facebook, and found that their followers want nonprofit organizations to take the lead building a community shaped by connection, dialogue and involvement. By comparing perspectives of SMPPs and their followers, I found that dialogic activities on social media can catalyze a culture of dialogue within a community, encouraging sharing, mutual support and connections. To facilitate the process, nonprofit professionals have taken on the role of a moderator that promotes dialogue centered around the community. Taken together, my research expands our current understanding about nonprofit organizations’ roles in public relations, and raises questions for future research about how nonprofit professionals balance the dialogic culture they work to cultivate on social media with other organizational priorities within an organizational or even sector-wide context.
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    Philanthropic Informatics
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2014-04-11) Voida, Amy
    I conduct research in human-centered computing with a focus on the challenges faced by the nonprofit and voluntary sector in using information and communication technologies. I conduct research in partnership with organizations in my local community, using the world as a living laboratory for identifying fundamental principles about the use of technology for philanthropy and civic engagement and for designing new technology to meet the needs of those individuals and organizations working toward the public good. The emphases and impacts of my research are threefold: • First, I conduct empirical studies of technology use within nonprofit organizations and translate these findings into key challenges for core areas in computer science. Over the past three years, for example, I have been working with volunteer coordinators to understand their information management needs, yielding insights about fundamental flaws in database usability that impede adoption—from the interface all the way down into the infrastructure. My research has found that schema-based databases are simply too inflexible for the dynamic information needs of nonprofit organizations. In addition, my empirical studies have shown a need for information management tools that support “little data,” enabling small businesses to adopt these technologies early and learn how to use them as their information needs expand. I have built collaborations with database and semantic web researchers and we are preparing to deploy and evaluate alternate paradigms of information management systems within a select number of these nonprofit organizations. • Second, I conduct empirical studies of how individuals who work as volunteers, advocates and donors use technologies to form productive partnerships with nonprofit organizations and work toward the public good. There is a burgeoning ecology of technologies being deployed in this domain, including the Red Cross’ TXT2HELP, Google’s One Today, Facebook’s Causes, DonorsChoose.org, VolunteerMatch.com, etc… yet little research has been conducted to understand the impact of these new technologies on either nonprofit organizations or members of the public. In this research, my theoretical focus is in understanding the ways that various forms of context influence civic engagement, including social, physical and temporal context. My study of technologies used for nonprofit giving, for example, found that a stronger synthesis of social and temporal context were needed to create a feedback loop between organizations and donors, and we are working to design new technologies that reflect such novel fusions of context. • Third, in all of my empirical work, I surface (where relevant) the mismatches between the philosophies and values underlying technology that has frequently been designed in the private sector and the philosophies and values that motivate civic engagement and much work in the nonprofit sector. For example, my empirical studies of social media use in nonprofit organizations has identified fundamental mismatches between the design and infrastructural trajectory of social computing (trending towards crowdsourcing and micro-volunteering) and the philosophical belief of many volunteer coordinators that individuals need to have sustained interactions with a cause for the experience to be impactful for the organization and meaningful for the volunteer. This mismatch presents numerous challenges for the design of social computing technologies and we are currently engaged in design research exploring ways to bridge between differing value systems. The nonprofit sector represents a unique and under-considered focus for the design of computing and information systems. Not only do nonprofit organizations operate under significant resource and expertise constraints that fundamentally influence technology use, they also chronically underutilize technology when they don’t see a direct connection between their mission and the technology. Nonprofit organizations are additionally under extraordinary social pressure to become more technically sophisticated. Several prominent new media scholars have argued that technologies such as text messaging enable people to organize themselves without the formal structures of traditional organizations, rendering traditional organizations increasingly irrelevant. If, however, we value the social role played by the nonprofit sector, then we need to address some significant technical and design challenges in order to ensure the future of formal organizations in the changing technological landscape of public civic engagement. These are the challenges that I confront in my research.
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    Supporting working time interruption management through persuasive design
    (2015-04-03) Liu, Yikun; Voida, Stephen; Bolchini, Davide; Voida, Amy; Ganci, Aaron
    Knowledge workers often suffer productivity loss because of unsuccessful interruption handling, which can lead to even more detrimental behaviors like "cyber-slacking" and procrastination. Many of the interruption management techniques proposed in the research literature focus on minimizing interruption occurrences. However, given the inevitability of internal and external interruptions in everyday life, it may be more practical to help people regulate how they respond to interruptions using persuasive technologies. The aim of this dissertation is to explore and evaluate the design of persuasive computer agents that encourage information workers to resume interrupted work. Based on a systematic review of interruptions in the workplace, theories of self-regulation, and theories guiding the design of persuasive technologies, this dissertation describes the creation of a prototype research platform, WiredIn. WiredIn enables researchers to explore a variety of interruption resumption support strategies on desktop computers. Two empirical studies that investigate the efficacy, attributes, and consequences of applying the paradigms embodied in WiredIn in controlled and real-life working environments are presented here. Both studies validate the effect of persuasive interventions on improving interruption management behaviors; the second study also provides design suggestions that can inform future work in supporting interruption management and multitasking.