Sorry about the hidden curriculum. :( When I applied to PhD programs the first time around, I was rejected from every single one of them. I’m sure there are a lot of reasons for this, and in the end though it was a long road it’s worked out fine for…

When the AI conference NeurIPS began requiring papers to include a broader impacts statement that includes “ethical aspects and future societal consequences,” there was a fair amount of pushback, and one social media comment I distinctly remember was along the lines of: How do they expect us to see the…

When I graduated with my PhD in the summer of 2015, I’d written a 200-page dissertation and also accumulated almost 30,000 meaningless internet points known as yakarma. Anonymously, on the location-based app Yik Yak, I complained about my university’s wifi, shared photos of campus squirrels and cookies I’d baked, argued…

This post touches in part on two papers out of my research lab being presented this week at SIGCSE 2021: “Integrating Ethics into Introductory Programming Classes” and “‘You don’t do your hobby as a job’: Stereotypes of Computational Labor and their Implications for CS Education.” …

As someone who cares a lot about broadening participation in computing, and also happens to read a lot of young adult and middle grade novels, I adore books that heavily feature technology and/or kids coding. Just in time for Computer Science Education Week and holiday gift-buying, here are recommendations for…

I wrote this short story in 2006, shortly after both my graduation from an MS degree in HCI (where some of my work was on educational technology and online communities) and from the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. It was never published, following a number of kind, close-but-no rejections. The idea behind…

There a lot of reasons why you might not be able to use technology the way you want to use it. In human-computer interaction (HCI) research, for example, we think a lot about design and usability. However, another reason might be: the law says you can’t. So what do we…

Last week, a federal court ruled that researchers violating a website’s terms of service (TOS) in order to conduct research aimed at uncovering discriminatory algorithms does not violate the U.S.’s Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Coincidentally, last week I also finalized the publication of a paper forthcoming at ICWSM…

A little over two years ago, I crowdsourced a collection of syllabi for tech ethic courses. Today, there are over 250 courses listed, representing a variety of universities and disciplines. Over time I’ve heard from a lot of people about how useful they’ve found it to poke around and see…