Preconference-Workshops

Synopsis: This half-day workshop aims to bring early career scholars together to address unique issues they face, develop strategies to achieve career goals, and foster a professional network. AoIR’s strength is its community. Many of AoIR’s senior members “came up through the ranks” together and have built a strong network that has benefited their careers. AoIR has a formal mechanism for mentoring doctoral students, and with this workshop, we hope to introduce a similar initiative for junior scholars like ourselves. Our intent is to be as inclusive and representative as possible.

Upon obtaining a terminal degree, early-career researchers and educators are presented with a series of hurdles to negotiate as well as opportunities. First, we have to negotiate the transition from graduate student to early career professional that requires a higher level of autonomy and responsibility with the challenge of figuring out the pragmatic and social aspects of a new work environment. Second, and simultaneously, we must work quickly to establish ourselves in our fields and, often, secure funding. Third, we must take on more prominent service roles. Fourth, after being guided by our advisors and committees for several years, we quickly move from mentee to mentor as we work with our own students. Fifth, we must learn to navigate the ins-and-outs of moving to the next level of our careers (e.g. obtaining tenure in the U.S., or applying for promotion UK), and ensure time with family and friends. Being a junior scholar also can afford certain benefits, such as job mobility within and across academic systems. However, while recognition of internet scholarship has come a long way since AoIR’s inception, junior scholars still may find themselves facing certain hurdles in gaining recognition for their research (i.e. subject, method, etc) in terms of promotion. In fact, some of the challenges we face also are opportunities to work towards changing the ways in which internet scholarship is perceived and valued within the academic structure.

These are just some issues covered by this workshop. AoIR is an international and diverse organization, and our experiences as scholars and educators vary by country, institution type, and field and are framed by our own identities (race, gender, etc). Our goal is to discuss shared challenges and opportunities while understanding differences so that we can build our own professional networks at the same time that we create a community of scholars who will eventually become future career mentors within AoIR.

Format: We are planning three sessions. We will open with introductions and a brief discussion among participants about what we would like to address within the workshop. The first session will be a fish-bowl like discussion among early-career scholars. This is intended as a get-to-know others event as well as an opportunity to discuss the issues and opportunities we face on the road to tenure or promotion. Organizers will bring starting questions to get the conversation moving and incorporate any other questions and concerns posed by participants. The second session will be a panel of established scholars (equivalent of associate or full professors in the U.S.) who can share their insight and experiences. The organizers will start the panel with questions drawn from the first session. In the final session, participants will form small groups with a senior scholar to address topics relevant to them (type of institution, academic system, etc). Time will be left for follow-up questions and group discussion. We also are planning an informal social activity following the workshop.

To date the following mid-career and senior scholars have agreed to serve on the expert panel and share their insight: Jenny Stromer-Galley, Syracuse University; Charles Ess, University of Oslo; Alex Halavais, Arizona State University; Karine Nahon, College of Herzliya/University of Washington; André Brock, University of Michigan; Anja Bechmann, Aarhus University. We also plan to recruit additional panelists.

Audience: This workshop is geared toward early career scholars who have their terminal degree and are working toward establishing themselves in a scholarly career.

Goals: 1) Provide a space for the next generation of AoIR scholars to start building strong ties with each other, more established researchers, and the AoIR community. 2) To promote understanding of the breadth of academic work, including our shared experiences and differences. 3) Connect with established academics to learn strategies for forwarding our careers. 4) Gain insight into how to formulate similar workshops in future years that support the need for mentoring early scholars in the AoIR community.

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Internet Rules . . . . for Higher Education

Organizers: Kerry Burner (Florida State University), Rajash Rawal (The Hague University), Vanessa Dennen (Florida State University), Paul Nixon (The Hague University)

The use of the Internet as a resource repository, delivery platform, and communication medium has all but become ubiquitous in higher education settings. Internet use is typically governed at a high level by multiple entities: the institutions who develop policy, the governments who develop regulations, and the corporations who design the means of access. While the Internet is a global tool, these various local entities have tried to regulate its use in various contexts. While these help to shape the general approach to incorporating the Internet, at the level of the classroom, instructors often find themselves needing to be much more granular about Internet use for higher education purposes. That is, these entities are shaping classroom use but not at a sufficient level, and instructors need to address practical higher education use with specific guidelines. Developing these guidelines relies on decisions that need to be made across dimensions like personal vs professional use; in-class and extracurricular use; providing instructor modeling, learner instruction and guidance.

In this workshop, we will work collaboratively to develop guidelines specific to the faculty, students, content area, and learning context to address pressures such as sociopolitical issues, personal privacy issues, identity issues, technology issues – including access, cultural and geographic issues, and legal and corporate constraints. This grassroots approach to developing guidelines offers workshop participants an opportunity to think through real world tensions such as free speech and activism in a learning context where lines of acceptability are not unilaterally drawn. Recognizing that life operates within a system, we need to be savvy to function within that system – or more realistically sets of systems and networks – but as members of the academy, we should also be active participants in (re)shaping the very systems that delineate our interactions with the Internet and its use in higher education settings.

The workshop facilitators will begin with a review some existing guidelines (e.g., institutional policy, government policy, and the terms and conditions of the tools), then move to guided activities to identify and define the constituting factors influencing the development of a classroom specific set of guidelines for Internet use in the classroom. Once the factors are identified and defined, the workshop participants and facilitators will collaborate to develop guidelines that respond to them. At the conclusion of the workshop, the facilitators and participants will have developed a constellation of guidelines that attempt to address the practical reality of using the Internet in the classroom.

These guidelines will not be definitive, but rather adaptive, recognizing the unique confluence of individual, institutional and cultural pressures that affect the ways in which faculty and students interact with and are received by netizens at large in a learning context. We anticipate that the “rules” generated by this workshop will provide a menu of options for faculty with which they can tailor guidelines for their specific learning contexts, students, and pedagogical approach to Internet use. Too, they could be of value to institutions as they revise and refine their own policies in response to the ever-changing technology, privacy, and sociopolitical landscapes

Our working draft of “Internet rules … for higher education” will be made available online so all participants and other interested parties may access them and adapt them for their own purposes. We will use a creative commons license –

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) – so that these guidelines can continue to evolve in response to the ever-changing landscape of Internet rules.

Workshop Format and Activities:

This workshop will combine the following activities:

• Presentation of existing rules and guidelines by the facilitators
• Brainstorming activities involving all participants
• Design guidelines in small groups while the facilitators circulate and assist the participants
• Sharing/debriefing of the small group design activities
• Participants individually develop guidelines deployable in their classrooms
• Capture of all ideas generated at the workshop to be shared online with all participants

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Legal Hackathon: Building Standards of Privacy and Security-by-Design for the Internet of Things

Organizer: Maximilian von Grafenstein (Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Germany)

Using the example of gathering personal data via a public wifi infrastructure for Smart City applications, this half-day workshop, facilitated by Max von Grafenstein, focuses on the question of how privacy- and security-by-design standards (be they de facto standards or those in the form of co-regulated codes of conduct or certificates) may constitute appropriate regulatory instruments that balance the individual and societal need for data based-innovation and protection against its risks. To elaborate on this question, the workshop uses the format of a Legal Hackathon, which refers to the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of software hackathons. Seeking to quickly transpose some initial ideas into working prototypes and/or clarify these ideas through prototyping, the Legal Hackathon format promises to provide the ideal conditions for a first proof of concept for privacy- and security-by-design standards for emergent innovations based, for example, on personal data gathered via a public wifi infrastructure in a Smart City environment and, more generally, the Internet of Things (IoT).

The idea of standards is promising since, in principle, they provide for appropriate instruments that create trust not only on the economic and social level but also with respect to the law. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which has recently passed the trilogue and consequently comes into force the 25th of May 2018, requires data controllers who process personal data to “implement appropriate technical and organizational measures (…) which are designed to implement data protection principles”. However, legal uncertainty is high because there are several unanswered questions. For example, first, what do the data protection principles specifically mean?; second, what stakeholder(s) fulfill(s) the legal criteria of a “controller”?; and third, should the producer(s) of the infrastructure, for example, of the IoT device, be involved, if they are not a “controller”, in order to enable the actual controller to implement such privacy-by-design measures?

The Legal Hackathon addresses these questions by inviting companies and startups that are developing IoT solutions for Smart City environments, security- and privacy-by-design experts and academics from the legal, social and economic sciences to elaborate on the concept, impact and functions of European data protection law. The Legal Hackathon seeks to elaborate, in particular, on the following aspects: First, whether or not it is technically, organizationally as well as legally possible to create a common privacy- and security-by-design standard for personal data gathered via a public wifi infrastructure; second, if so, what this standard should look like to ensure that the trust-enhancing advantages outweigh the technical and organizational efforts (particularly when it comes to an individual’s „consent“); and third, whether or not such a standard could fulfill the requirements provided for by the GDPR with respect to the procedures for codes of conducts and/or certificates.

If the Legal Hackathon can generate constructive outcomes, this will serve as a first proof of concept for the general claim that privacy- and security-by-design standards are a serious issue for those seeking to find a balance between the societal need for data-based innovation and protection against its risks. The findings may be transposed, in subsequent Legal Hackathons, to further areas of the IoT such as Smart Homes or Wearables.

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Digital Methods in Internet Research: A Sampling Menu

Organizers: Erik Borra (University of Amsterdam), Axel Bruns (Queensland University of Technology), Jean Burgess (Queensland University of Technology), Carolin Gerlitz (University of Amsterdam), Anne Helmond (University of Amsterdam), Ariadna Matamoros Fernandez (Queensland University of Technology), Peta Mitchell (Queensland University of Technology), Richard Rogers (University of Amsterdam), Fernando N. van der Vlist (University of Amsterdam), Esther Weltevrede (University of Amsterdam), Patrik Wikstrom (Queensland University of Technology)