Browsing by Author "Renaud, Karen"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    A bridge over the computer science graduate skill gap
    (2013) Blignaut, Renette; Venter, Isabella M.; Renaud, Karen
    Universities are increasingly required to respond to the ever evolving needs of an ever more sophisticated and globalised workplace, which requires well-rounded workers with more than mere technical knowledge. Employers expect their prospective employees to already have acquired a range of professional and personal skills. Universities face a challenge in helping students to develop these skills and it is debatable whether this can be achieved within the university environment. What is needed is a way for students to interact with the outside world as part of their undergraduate programme in a situated learning environment. This paper reports on a computer science assignment specifically designed to develop professional and personal as well as discipline-specific skills. The results suggest that situated learning assignments are indeed able to enhance the development of precisely those soft skills which are so valued by employers.
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    Cyber security education is as essential as “the three R's”
    (CELLPRESS, 2019) Venter, Isabella M.; Blignaut, Renette J.; Renaud, Karen; Venter, Anja
    Smartphones have diffused rapidly across South African society and constitute the most dominant information and communication technologies in everyday use. That being so, it is important to ensure that all South Africans know how to secure their smart devices. Doing so requires a high level of security awareness and knowledge. As yet, there is no formal curriculum addressing cyber security in South African schools. Indeed, it seems to be left to universities to teach cyber security principles, and they currently only do this when students take computingrelated courses. The outcome of this approach is that only a very small percentage of South Africans, i.e. those who take computing courses at university, are made aware of cyber security risks and know how to take precautions. In this paper we found that, because this group is overwhelmingly male, this educational strategy disproportionately leaves young South African women vulnerable to cyber-attacks. We thus contend that cyber security ought to be taught as children learn the essential “3 Rs”—delivering requisite skills at University level does not adequately prepare young South Africans for a world where cyber security is an essential skill. Starting to provide awareness and knowledge at primary school, and embedding it across the curriculum would, in addition to ensuring that people have the skills when they need them, also remove the current gender imbalance in cyber security awareness.
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    Designing mobile phone interfaces for age diversity in South Africa: “One-World” versus diverse “Islands”
    (Springer, 2013) Renaud, Karen; Blignaut, Renette; Venter, Isabella M.
    Designing for diversity is a laudable aim. How to achieve this, in the context of mobile phone usage by South African seniors, is a moot point. We considered this question from two possible perspectives: universal (one-world) versus focused design (designing for diverse “islands” of users). Each island would be characterised by a measure of relative homogeneity in terms of user interface needs. Our particular focus in this paper is age diversity. The universal approach attempts to deliver a design that can be all things to all people – meeting the needs of all users within one user interface. The islander approach delivers specific and different designs for islands within a diverse world. To determine which the best approach would be, in the South African context, we dispatched a team of student researchers to interview participants from an older generation, on a one-to-one basis. It was beneficial to deploy aspiring designers to carry out this research because we wanted to confront aspiring researchers with the differences between their own and other generations’ usage of, and attitudes towards, mobile phones. Our study found that there were indeed significant age-related differences in mobile phone usage. Our research delivered insights that led to a model of the factors impacting mobile phone usage of the senior generation as a series of filters between the user and their device. We conclude that the island approach is more suitable for age-specific design. This approach might well become less fitting as a more technologically experienced population ages, but at present there is a clear need for an agesensitive mobile interface design.
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    Granny gets smarter but junior hardly notices
    (College of Communication and Information, 2016) Blignaut, Renette; Venter, Isabella Margarethe; Renaud, Karen
    To ensure that university computing students are sensitized to the needs of diverse user groups, a course project was designed to allow students to get a realistic understanding of the needs and abilities of the older mobile phone user. Over a three year period different student cohorts interviewed these users to assess their experience with mobile phones. It was found that students were generally dismissive of the cognitive abilities of the older mobile phone user. However the yearly snapshot revealed that the older user’s abilities improved year on year. Being prepared to understand all user groups is an essential skill that should be acquired by future interface designers.
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    A quantification mechanism for assessing adherence to information security governance guidelines
    (Emerald, 2022) Bongiovanni, Ivano; Renaud, Karen; Brydon, Humphrey
    Boards of Directors and other organisational leaders make decisions about the information security governance systems to implement in their companies. The increasing number of cyber-breaches targeting businesses makes this activity inescapable. Recently, researchers have published comprehensive lists of recommended cyber measures, specifically to inform organisational boards. However, the young cybersecurity industry has still to confirm and refine these guidelines. As a starting point, it would be helpful for organisational leaders to know what other organisations are doing in terms of using these guidelines. In an ideal world, bespoke surveys would be developed to gauge adherence to guidelines, but this is not always feasible. What we often do have is data from existing cybersecurity surveys. The authors argue that such data could be repurposed to quantify adherence to existing information security guidelines, and this paper aims to propose, and test, an original methodology to do so.
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    Smartphone owners need security advice. How can we ensure they get it?
    (CONF-IRM and AIS Electronic Library (AISeL), 2016) Renaud, Karen; Blignaut, Renette; Venter, Isabella
    Computer users often behave insecurely, and do not take the precautions they ought to. One reads almost daily about people not protecting their devices, not making backups and falling for phishing messages. This impacts all of society since people increasingly carry a computer in their pockets: their smartphones. It could be that smartphone owners simply do not know enough about security threats or precautions. To address this, many official bodies publish advice online. For such a broadcast-type educational approach to work, two assumptions must be satisfied. The first is that people will deliberately seek out security-related information and the second is that they will consult official sources to satisfy their information needs. Assumptions such as these ought to be verified, especially with the numbers of cyber attacks on the rise. It was decided to explore the validity of these assumptions by surveying students at a South African university, including both Computer Science and Non-Computer Science students. The intention was to explore levels of awareness of Smartphone security practice, the sources of advice the students used, and the impact of a Computer Science education on awareness and information seeking behaviours. Awareness, it was found, was variable across the board but poorer amongst students without a formal computing education. Moreover, it became clear that students often found Facebook more helpful than public media, in terms of obtaining security advice.