In this talk, we will give an update to our Google Funded project focused on Search Literacy. Search Literacy refers to people’s search skills: their techniques and strategies for finding information. With the aim of helping people to develop their search skills, we will describe the results of an in-progress study comparing the searching behaviours of people with different search and technology expertise levels.
Today, every individual could be thought of as living in a data rich eco-system. One which provides increasingly data driven, personalised and context sensitive services which are provided in return for personal data. This ecosystem is asymmetric in terms of power over data, as presently users exercise minimum or even no control over their own data. For this situation to become more balanced, the ‘dialogue’ between users and services needs to be more than just ‘ticking’ a Terms and Conditions’ box. The University of Nottingham and BBC R&D are working together to understand user attitudes and behaviours in this context and as part of this initiative conducted a scenario based exploration of a possible future technology, an adaptive Electronic Programme Guide. Focus groups were run in Manchester and Nottingham where mockups of the EPG and its functionalities were presented to participants. They were then asked to discuss among themselves what they thought about the proposed technology. The discussions ranged diversely from dissatisfaction about current recommender systems to fear of surveillance through personal data collection. The talk would outline this study and the future possibilities these discussions have opened up.
University of Nottingham School of Computer Science Nottingham, NG8 1BB
email: mrl@cs.nott.ac.uk