Sarah Parsons has been awarded prizes of £500 each for two papers submitted to the EPSRC-funded call for papers on Responsible Innovation in ICT. Both papers were accepted following peer review and have now been published in the online Observatory.
The first paper co-authored with Sue Cobb at the University of Nottingham discusses the importance of user ‘voices’ in research and draws upon over a decade of work involving children and young people on the autism spectrum in educational technology design. The paper describes the kinds of methods that have been used to support children’s involvement, using examples drawn from three different projects.
The second paper was co-authored with Chris Abbott from KCL and discusses the ethical challenges of gaining informed consent from children and young people to take part in research. The paper argues that digital technologies potentially have an important role to play in this process by making information more accessible and responses more autonomous for children and young people with a range of communication needs.
