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Course Description This course will cover topics in Communication, Computer Science and New Media to understand what motivates use of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), whether and how those motivations may trump risk assessments, and whether and how people who engage in CMC perceive the security and privacy risks that software interfaces must be engineered around. It will emphasize techniques drawn from Human-Computer Interaction in order to engineer and study the efficacy of such interfaces. Students in this course will gain a grounding in the ever-evolving psychological and social realities affecting how humans respond to security and privacy issues and skills for designing, building, and assessing both single-user and community software interfaces. While the ideal form of security might be the one which users need never think about, the realities of the evolving challenges in security and privacy necessitates involving users as both informed operators and consumers of security and privacy technologies. How do users understand the prevalence, nature and extent of these risks, as well as the array of choices they have in dealing with the risks? This course will engage students in understanding and learning about how, in order to function in a connected world, users make decisions about how much risk they are willing to assume with any given action. Suggested Textbook and Topics Rogers, Y., Sharp, H., & Preece, J. (2011). Interaction design: Beyond human-computer interaction (3rd edition). Chichester, UK: Wiley In addition, many papers and book chapters will be assigned for readings every week regarding the following topics outlined below. Topics A week by week list of topics is outlined below. Students will be assigned at least two weeks during which they will be responsible for presenting a book, chapter, journal article, or some other reading material to the class. Their responsibility will be to summarize it, describe why it’s important (with particular focus on its theoretical contributions), contextualize it within the group of readings already assigned, and ask questions about it.
Grading Grading will be based on group project presentations, group project writeup, and class participation derived from presentations, discussion and close readings of the texts. |
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