This trans-cultural study deals with the question whether social network sites (SNS) may be considered 'third places', where young people find an unrestricted space for self-expression and reflection apart from formal environments (such as universities) and parental control, as well as whether the perception and adoption of such services varies among different cultural communities. To assess these questions, group discussions, qualitative interviews (n = 25) and an online survey (n = 757) were conducted in Thailand and Austria. While all of the respondents use SNS for lifelogging -storing and sharing life experience -the perception of emotional third-place qualities of SNS varies among young people living in Thailand and Austria. The findings show that some effects related to emotional aspects of technology usage might result from the stage of diffusion of technology, while aspects of emotional experience and expression might be influenced by cultural models.

No abstract

Our research project was aimed at teaching high-school pupils game design skills and raising their awareness for the subject area “informatics and society.” A project-based-teaching approach enabled us to incorporate social learning by having teams of pupils work on informatics-and-society topics and subsequently design their own games. The focus of this article is an online survey conducted twice, at the beginning and end of the pupils’ project participation, showing if and how the participants’ attitudes towards and awareness of informatics and society changed during this school year. We discuss the most important survey results, also in relation to studies on internet use of adolescents in the German-speaking countries. Additionally, an evaluation group discussion with the involved teachers provides expert validity. We found that our project-based and social-learning approach was successful in raising awareness for informatics and society as well as in teaching game design.

Foreign correspondents seem to have become an endangered species. They are said to be increasingly substituted by new forms of foreign correspondence. These claims are often raised by researchers studying foreign correspondence to and from the United States and the United Kingdom. We test whether assumptions about the demise and substitution of the traditional foreign correspondent also apply beyond these contexts. Particularly, the study seeks to explore the differences in the working conditions of various kinds of foreign correspondents. Based on 211 responses gathered through an

This article discusses the use of game design as a method for interdisciplinary project-based teaching in secondary school education to convey informatics and society topics, which encompass the larger social context of computing. There is a lot of knowledge about learning games but little background on using game design as a method for project-based teaching of social issues in informatics. We present the results of an analysis of student-created games and an evaluation of a student-authored database on learning contents found in commercial off-the-shelf games. We further contextualise these findings using a group discussion with teachers. The results underline the effectiveness of project-based teaching to raise awareness for informatics and society topics. We further outline informatics and society topics that are particularly interesting to students, genre preferences, and potentially engaging game mechanics stemming from our analyses.