Conference Papers
Associate Professor Dawn Schrader is delivering 3 papers at the Association for Moral Education annual conference.
- “Four Case Studies of Ethics in Political Revolutions: Moral Education and the Ethical and Epistemological Effects of Content Moderation in Social Media” (with Itamar Mandelzis): Using 4 case studies that present ethical considerations on censorship, privacy, free speech, civil discourse, and self-governance, they examine the ethical perspectives needed to be considered to protect human freedoms, and conclude the paper with ethical guidelines to share with consumers of social media as well as developers and governmental agencies to protect citizens informed moral and political actions.
- “Embodiment of AI and Its Social, Cognitive, and Moral Impacts on Youth” (with Sara Choi): This paper identifies moral and ethical impacts of human interactions with embodied (robots) and disembodied (e.g. Alexa) AI regarding its structural makeup, functions, and smart capabilities compared to humans. It then examines the potentialities and dangers of human interactions with AI, especially for youth. They propose rethinking the content and forms of moral education of youth and vulnerable populations to protect children from potential exploitation. They posit that the form of embodiment of AI will play an increasingly less relevant role for children and digital natives, and conclude that cognitive developmental moral education of AI developers should focus on moral sensitivity to these psychological factors of youth interaction.
- “Developing Technologies Effect on Socio-moral Epistemology of Youth: Moral Education of Developers Effect on Positive Youth Development” (with Divya Akkiraju): As developers create technologies used by children and adults alike, in schools, in news and information venues, in economic marketing, and even in social profiling and policing, minds and sociality are impacted. While malintent may not be present in the engineering of these technologies, the so-called “objectivity” of algorithms nonetheless has societal and personal moral impact. Embedding moral education as a foundation of computer science curricula, they propose a moral education-driven revolution in the field of computer science education centered around equipping developers with the ability to be able to morally evaluate the impact of their technical work on greater society, and youth in schools to increase awareness and reflectivity on underlying ethics of social justice and such violations when interacting with (especially educational) technologies that are ‘objectively’ algorithmically based, which actually have an impact on individual thought, epistemology, and behavior.
Events
Join us for our Distinguished Lecture, part of the COMMColloquium series, this Friday, October 27, at 1:00 pm in 102 Mann Library Building. Associate Professor Caitlin Petre (Rutgers University will present “All the News That’s Fit to Click.” The event is followed by a reception, located in The Hub of the Department of Communication.
Publications
Professor Natalie Bazarova et al., July 2023, “The Youth Social Media Literacy Inventory: Development and Validation Using Item Response Theory in the US,” Journal of Children and Media. The authors developed and validated the Youth Social Media Literacy Inventory, a 90-item bank, that can be used to objectively assess youth’s social media literacy. Due to its excellent psychometric properties, it allows scholars to create scales of varying length and for different research purposes. Educators and researchers can use the inventory to assess the effectiveness of social media literacy interventions; compare levels of social media literacy across groups, schools, or populations; and assess antecedents and consequences of social media literacy
Assistant Professor Monica Cornejo et al., October 2023, “Testing Advocacy Communication Theory among Undocumented College Students Using Latent Profile Analysis,” Communication Monographs. Undocumented college students face systemic oppression, which they challenge through advocacy. Often, research focuses on one type of advocacy, but Advocacy Communication Theory (ACT) conceptualizes advocacy as multidimensional—minoritized people can engage in communicative strategies at the interpersonal, mediated, community, organizational, and policy levels to challenge oppression. The authors used three waves of longitudinal survey data from 366 undocumented students, primarily of Latine origin, and conducted latent profile analyses. They found four advocacy communication profiles: Infrequent, Interpersonal, Organizational, and Frequent Advocators. The more students observed their family engage in undocumented advocacy, and the more students saw negative media depictions of undocumented immigrants, the more likely students were to be frequent advocators than infrequent advocators. Their findings support ACT's propositions.
GSA
The Communication Graduate Student Association hosted a campus-wide scavenger hunt on October 10 for Comm grad students. They had a great time finding hidden gems across campus and celebrated with Dairy Bar ice cream at the end.
