In my job as a professor I am often in conversations with people about the value of a college education and how different institutions articulate that value. Over time I’ve come up with a response to the question “What is college selling?” and I decided to write it up into a Medium post. It’s kind…
I recently collaborated on an article with Chris Kornelis of the Wall Street Journal about cryptojacking. This is the (generally) illegal practice of taking over someone’s computer to mine cryptocurrency. Anatomy of a Cryptojacking:(WSJ,local copy)
I wrote a Medium article in which I obsessively collected instances of 3-word taglines in the wild. It is some kind of a thing that I’m not sure that people realize is going on. Once you see my collection you will spot them EVERYWHERE. I’m not sure what is in the marketing water that has…
The national conversation about transgender individuals that peaked for a time toward the end of Obama’s presidency caused a number of institutions to change their bathroom signage. I found this interesting since this was the dominant exposure and focal point that most people had with the issues. Human-computer interaction spends a lot of time thinking…
“Teaching Global Disruption and Information Technology Online” accepted for publication in Interactions magazine As a part of a special issue on Sustainable HCI Education in Interactions magazine, Bill Tomlinson, Bonnie Nardi and myself, elaborated on an online course that we taught about Global Disruption and Information Technology. This article was part of an ongoing conversation with…
Special Issue on Sustainable HCI Education published in IX (interactions) magazine Recently Bonnie Nardi, Bill Tomlinson and I were invited to curate a special issue of Interactions magazine that focussed on teaching sustainable HCI. Interactions will often have a series of articles on a topical theme within a given publication and this month we put…
On opinion piece I wrote at the start of the school year for the Westmont College student paper about the implications of the data breach at the dating site for married people, AshleyMadison.com In our increasingly digitized world there is very little that can be kept hidden anymore. As the Internet of things pursues the…
Keeping up with our family’s use of digital technology is a lot like a trip to the beach. On most days, the ocean doesn’t pose too much of a danger to our four kids. They stay together, they have survived a few seasons of swim team and they already have a healthy fear of the…
I was recently asked to describe my philosophy of a Christian liberal arts education. Education is important to my family and I, and it was a good exercise for me to explicitly link education to my faith. Therefore, a liberal arts education is the imbuing of knowledge, the development of skills for the synthesis and…
Here is a short essay on my view about how my faith impacts the study of computer science. This is something that I think is important, but is also something that is in flux in my life. “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I…
This article in Interactions was intended to be an introduction to the idea of Collapse Informatics that was elaborated in other publications in more depth. In a recent NSF-funded National Academies symposium on Science, Innovation, and Partnerships for Sustainability Solutions, there was a great deal of discussion about global change. To offer a few concrete…
This was a short editorial for the online tech news blogs ZDNet: There is no way that managers and their subordinates see eye to eye on social networking in the workplace. Why should they? To employers and employees alike, most social networking sites are about entertainment. Tweeting about Gail’s birthday party decorations is only in…