Saturday, July 23, 2016: 5:00 pm (Noether): When you work in IT or Infosec, it may feel like you’re constantly fighting a battle to bring the non-technical people you work with up to speed on how technologies work. When you help family members with their computer problems, you may just want to throw up your hands and scream “It’s no use! They just don’t get it!” But when you dig a little deeper, as a number of studies have done, you find that the average person does have some knowledge about how the Internet works. They build on this knowledge every day - but sometimes they’re incorporating what they’ve learned from that scene on NCIS where two people are using a keyboard at once. They may hold some common misconceptions. Or they may be sooo close and just need one little additional piece of information.
Gus will share insights from the study she has been working on for the past year about average people’s mental models of the Internet, along with a number of other studies from human-computer interaction and security research. Key concepts like “mental models,” “fragile knowledge,” “stereotype threat,” and “learned helplessness” will be explored. In addition, ways the gaps in people’s knowledge impact digital security and how we might strategize on a large scale to help fill those gaps will be explored. You’ll come away with better strategies for helping empower the non-technical folks in your life to solve their own problems.

Gillian “Gus” Andrews