iConference 2011 Alternative Events
Session 1: Fishbowl
Homelessness and Information Systems: Diverse Settings, Common Questions
Location: Fourth Floor, Columbia Room
Organizers: David Hendry (Washington), Julie Hersberger (UNC), Christopher Le Dantec (Georgia Tech.), Bonnie Nardi, (UC Irvine), Jill Palzkill Woelfer (Washington)
How can information systems improve the welfare of homeless people? In this session we take up this question and discuss the potential impacts of information systems on four dimensions of homelessness: community, identity, stigma, and vulnerability.
Drawing upon experiences obtained through sustained engagements in three different homeless communities, the panelists will engage a number of related questions, including: How can information systems help people escape homelessness? What is known about the diffusion and adoption of digital media in homeless communities? What is at stake by the adoption of mobile and digital technologies? To what purposes are digital media and mobile technologies being put by homeless people? By the diffusion of information systems into homeless communities, what stakeholders and institutions become implicated and what tensions emerge? What methodological challenges exist for conducting empirical and design-based research in homeless communities?
Session 2: Posters and Roundtable
Design Methods for the Information School Curriculum
Location: Third Floor, East Room
Organizers: Jean-François Blanchette (UCLA), Matt Ratto (Toronto), Amelia Acker (UCLA)
Why have Information Schools become hubs for innovation in technology design and development? This session will attempt to identify some of the answers, with a specific focus on how methodology is influencing this trend.
In an era of ubiquitous and pervasive information technologies and services, information professionals are increasingly tasked with the creation and implementation of novel, innovative and effective information infrastructures and practices. Such innovation involves intimate knowledge of the social context of activities and relationships within which new devices and services will be deployed, as well as an enhanced understanding of the constraints and possibilities of software and hardware platforms, infrastructure, and design methodologies. This session thus reports on experiments with the integration of design-based research methods in the iSchool curriculum, methods aimed at providing the knowledge and experiences necessary for information professionals to act as innovators within this space.
The session will provide attendees with a focused overview of the application of design methods to the iSchool curriculum, and their potential to foster new forms of engagement and collaboration with information technology designers and users. It will start with a short introduction on design in information science, studies, and systems. The audience will then be brought to engage with posters and interactive demonstrations of design-related work by students. These include a proposition for a design framework following the design science research approach, illustrated with an example of its use to develop a design theory and tools for business services (Lysanne Lessard). An interactive dress exploring the effect of garment size standardization on body image and body comfort, and reflecting an interactive design approach and Critical Making perspective will also be presented (ginger coons and Mike Tissenbaum). Another interactive demonstration will concern an information system designed to help customers locate foods aligned with their concerns and values in grocery stores; this design is based on a field study where observations and collaborative sketching of design mockups were performed (Ian Leong, Heather Lowe, Lynne Drake, Emily Wittenberg). Finally, the audience will be able to engage with a collaborative annotation interface for Google Books aiming to support collaborative analysis across disciplines and time zones; this proposition follows the use of design thinking as a methodology (Vivian Choy, Jun Pan, Derek Quezada).
The last part of the session will consist of a roundtable and open discussion on the value of design and design methodologies for iSchools, guided by four panelists. Jean- François Blanchette will discuss the development of a systems design course emphasizing studio-based pedagogy, visual research methods, and the material foundations of cognition. Matt Ratto will introduce the “Critical Making” laboratory he leads, as a novel space for conceptualizing and investigating the critical social, cultural, and political issues that surround and influence the movement of information processing capability into the physical environment. Katie Shilton will use a case study in the design of emerging sensing technologies to explore how LIS professionals can use the design process to advocate for traditional LIS concerns, such as community participation and information privacy. Ramesh Srinivasan will discuss approaches in system and ontology design that consider everyday cultural and social practices, based on a set of field projects located in different parts of the world.
Sesion 3: Panel
Theories of Information Behavior in Motion
Location: Fourth Floor, Seneca Room
Organizers: Sanda Erdelez (Missouri), Karen Fisher (Washington)
An update on the research and professional impact of work that emerged from the 1995 book "Theories of Information Behavior."
In 1995 an international group of more than 70 collaborators produced an edited volume Theories of Information Behavior (TIB) that provided an unprecedented overview of models, frameworks and theories with potential importance in understanding the interaction between people and information. What happened with the theories presented in the book? What was their impact on research and professional practice? What new, promising theories of IB have emerged since, either from within the field or have been adopted from outside? The objective of the proposed panel is to explore these questions through an engaging forum with particular focus on how IB theories can be used to inform the design of information applications and services.
Session 7: Panel
The Informational State: Paradigm or Paradox?
Location: Fourth Floor, Spring Room
Organizers: Paul Duguid (UC Berkeley), Megan Finn (UC Berkeley), Ashwin Jacob Mathew (UC Berkeley), Janaki Srinivasan (UC Berkeley)
How is and how has information been used to support state-making? What are the tensions implicit and explicit in this process?
The aim of this panel is to address the under-explored relationship between information and the state. Using the literature, we have extracted three interconnected perspectives to discuss in our panel: the state's creation of an “information order”; information making by the state as simultaneously a process of state making; and finally, information making by the state as a process of constructing the imagined state. We will each speak to these interdependent themes using the context of our own research. Our projects include work about the governance of Internet infrastructure, the negotiation of access to government records by citizens in rural India, earthquake response in California and the nineteenth-century creation of a new kind of (intellectual) property in trademarks. Yet in examining each of these topics separately, we hope to show how collectively they address a central topic of information and the state that should be a rich area of investigation for the iSchools.
Session 8: Alternative Event/Slam
The Sociotechnical Learning Object Slam Happening
Location: Fourth Floor, Columbia Room
Organizers: Michael Khoo, Michael Twidale, Andrea Wiggins, Jennifer Rode
There is no better setting to learn about the interactions among people, society and context than an iConference. This yearly event is always among the conference's most well-attended.
iTeaching sociotechnical concepts requires insightful, effective and engaging instructional resources suitable for students of various levels. The authors propose an interactive Alternative Event, the Sociotechnical Learning Object Slam Happening (SLOSH), in which participants will design and then present prototype sociotechnical learning objects. Discussion will be initiated regarding requirements for an online SLO Repository.
Session 9: Wildcard/Discussion
Assessing the Practical Impact of Healthcare Research
Location: Third Floor, East Room
Organizers: Aleksandra Sarcevic (Rutgers), Sharoda Paul (Penn State), Brian Hilligoss (Michigan), Peter Scupelli (CMU)
This wildcard session aims to open discussion and sharing around experiences and outcomes of healthcare studies concerning large-scale, socio-technical systems such as hospitals.
Session 13: Industry Panel
Big Data
Location: B Level, Superior Room
Organizers: Moderator Jacob O. Wobbrock (Washington); Panelists Magdalena Balazinska (Washington), Vivek Bhaskaran (Survey Analytics), Cecilia Aragon (Washington) Andrew Borthwick (Intelius), Danyel Fisher (Microsoft Research), Jock Mackinlay (Tableau Software)
The Big Data panel brings together academics, researchers, industry scientists and businesspeople to discuss current issues in working with large data sets to bring about information, understanding, meaning and value. Big Data touches upon many areas, including databases, sensors, networks, security, privacy, visualization, analytics, search, perceptual and cognitive psychology, and business strategy, to name a few. Panelists will be asked to give a short description of the kind of work they do and how they relate to big data, followed by fielding questions from a moderator and/or the audience.
Session 14: Roundtable
The Creativity Agenda in the iSchool Context
Location: Third Floor, East Room
Organizers: Eric Cook (Michigan), Kurt Luther (Georgia Tech), Dan Perkel (UC Berkeley), Jeffery Bardzell (Indiana U.)
Attend a provocative roundtable discussion about the increased focus on the social and expressive as topics in iSchool research.
Broad shifts are taking place in the way we think about the relationships between ICTs, creativity, and creative expression. Access to low-cost, powerful computational tools of creation and dissemination has engendered new forms of aesthetics and expression, new opportunities for individuals, and new threats to traditional industries. In the iSchool academic community, there is a similar shift in research interests beyond a traditional focus on formal workplace settings and instrumental uses of information technology towards social, expressive, and generative concerns.
In this roundtable, we invite conference participants to engage and discuss these trends, and reflect on what the creativity agenda should mean in the iSchool context. The roundtable will consider the impact of this agenda along a variety of dimensions, including research, outreach, and curriculum design. We seek to highlight an emerging new direction of intellectual activity within the iSchools, as well as foster an ongoing conversation on how to address and seize the opportunities brought about by these shifts.
Session 15: Panel
Datanet: Collaboration, Curation, and Data in the iSchools
Location: Third Floor, South Room
Organizers: Geoffrey Bowker (University of Pittsburgh), Christine Borgman (UCLA), Carole Palmer (UIUC), Carol Tenopir (Tennessee)
What do iSchools have to add to the conversation around collaboration?
This panel session will present the iSchool involvement in the DataNet Initiative, funded by the National Science Foundation, and engage the iSchool community in a discussion of this research domain and the challenges of participating in large, distributed, virtual collaborations.
Session 20: Panel
Information Organization meets Information Retrieval: Rethinking the iSchool core
Location: Third Floor, East Room
Organizers: Christine Borgman (UCLA), Matthew Mayernik (UCLA), Ronald Larsen (Pittsburgh), Robert Glushko (UC Berkeley), Jess Hemerly (UC Berkeley)
This panel session has two goals: (1) to introduce a project dedicated to building a set of instructional materials — with a textbook at its core — that integrates information organization and information retrieval, both theory and practice, as applied in libraries, archives, business, computing, and social and personal environments; and (2) to engage the iSchool community in the project.
Session 21: Roundtable
Games in the iSchools
Location: Fourth Floor, Spring Room
Organizer: Ian MacInnes
Discover potential partners and collaborators as the roundtable discusses the state of gaming research.
The goal of this roundtable is to attract iSchool researchers who are exploring gaming research projects. This will be a sharing roundtable, with the hope of allowing researchers to make connections between schools and across disciplines. Those looking to get involved in gaming research are also welcome to attend and discover potential partnerships. The field continues to grow and generate interest in many areas of universities. One objective will be to discuss the potential for iSchool leadership in academic programs on gaming. Another will be to discuss potential multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional grant proposals that will allow iSchools to take their turn at the gaming table.
Session 22: Demonstration
Scratch on the Surface and Beyond: a Creative Programming Language for All Ages
Location: Fourth Floor, Columbia Room
Organizers: Eliza Dresang (Washington), Kyungwon Koh (Florida State), Katie Campana (Washington), Melissa Johnston (Florida State), Michale Lee (Washington), John Marino (Washington), Beth Patin (Washington)
Since 2007, almost 600,000 people have created projects using Scratch, a programming language with broad accessibility. Come see why first hand by experimenting with the language in a climate suited to experimentation.
This informal, highly interactive alternative event focuses on gaining familiarity and fluency with Scratch, a programming language developed at the MIT Media Lab and made public in May 2007. Originally developed for youth, as of July 2010 more than 598,006 participants from 5 to 70+ had registered on the website, creating 1,262,581 projects. After a brief introduction to Scratch, session participants will have a choice of several computer stations where they can experiment with the building block approach to programming, start on a project of their own, or engage in a serial collaborative project with Scratch ‘experts’ as guides.
Session 25: Industry Panel
Privacy in the Cloud
Location: Third Floor, South Room
Organizers: Moderator Barbara Endicott-Popovsky (Washington); Panelists John Christiansen (Christiansen IT Law), Jim Adler (Intelius), Melissa Chase (Microsoft), Ed Lazowska (Washington), Deborah Frincke (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Kirsten Anne Ferguson (Aberyswyth U.)
Cloud computing has significant implications for personal privacy and the confidentiality of sensitive business and government data. The dramatic rush to the cloud to take advantage of cost savings in the current economic environment warrants a more careful look at the unintended consequences to privacy and confidentiality.
Session 26: Discussion
Education Redesign – Birds of a Feather
Location: Third Floor, North Room
Organizers: Erin Knight (UC Berkeley), Nathan Gandomi (UC Berkeley)
How can iSchools use their expertise in design to shape the future of education in the US?
Education systems in this country - both K-12 and higher education - are struggling at best, or outright broken at worst, and are in desperate need for a fresh perspective, or a redesign. As researchers, technologists, system designers, information gatekeepers, user experience experts and educators, the iSchool community needs to take leadership in this fledgling space. This session will first briefly discuss the UC Berkeley School of Information's efforts to contribute to the space, inspire interest and consolidate efforts through their Center for Next Generation Teaching and Learning, but then open it up to the attendees to share their experiences, insights and interests. The ultimate goals are to create awareness about the issues, highlight any existing work from our community, inspire more focus from the iSchool community and forge partnerships for moving forward.
Session 27: Roundtable
iSchools as bridges between Scientometrics and STS
Session 27: Alternative Event
Organizers: Stasa Milojevic, Selma Sabanovic, Cassidy Sugimoto, Phillip Edwards, David Hakken, Cory Knobel
This round table will explore the various theories, models, concepts and methodological approaches used in studies of science and scientific practice within iSchools and allied disciplines.
Session 28: Mixer
Sharing the Socio-Technical Workshop Results: An Alternative Event with Alternate Endings
Location: Third Floor, South Room
Organizers: Sean Goggins (Drexel), Michael Twidale (Illinois), Brian Butler (Pittsburgh), Andrea Forté (Drexel), Christo Sims (UC Berkeley), Katie Panciera (Minnesota), Steve Sawyer (Syracuse), Kalpana Shankar (Indiana U.), Helena Mentis (Stockholm U.), Dana Rotman (Maryland)
A casual mixer for the curious about about socio-technical research.
This alternative event is designed as a casual, social environment for members of the iSchool community who are curious about socio-technical research. The event is designed around two opportunities for participants to explore sociotechnical research relative to the numerous scholarly traditions that are part of the iSchools. The setting is a room with a bar with various posters and demonstrations in the room. In the first part of the event, participants will be able to walk around and view and discuss posters representing artifacts from iSchool Socio-Technical workshops, past and present. In the second part of the event, participants will be given a “sociotechnical stamp card” that, once filled out through discussion with ’event hosts’, entitles them to a free glass of cheer (such as wine, beer, soda or single malt scotch).
Session 32: Fishbowl
When Matter matters – Aproaches for Studying Materiality in Context
Organizers: Arvind Karunakaran (Penn State), Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi (Syracuse), Phillip Ayoub (Penn State) and Carsten Østerlund (Syracuse)
How can interdisciplinarity help us rise to the challenges presented in the study of materiality?
Materiality is constitutive of everyday life. Recent efforts by different scholars from a variety of disciplines have brought forth a renewed interest on studying ‘materiality’ in context [1]. However, since materiality is so tightly enmeshed in our day to day activities, it is ‘invisible’ and is often ‘taken for granted’. This brings forth a lot of epistemological and methodological challenges to researchers who are interested in understanding materiality, and in uncovering sociomaterial practices. This fishbowl session aims to bring together researchers from different disciplines (such as HCI, CSCW, Organizational Studies, Information Systems, Library & Information Sciences) to brainstorm about the approaches they have used (or, are planning to use) in studying ‘materiality’, and to reflect on the challenges they have faced in the due process. Primary aim of this fishbowl is twofold: a) To promote a conversation about the various facets of ‘materiality’, including theories that deal with materiality; b) To bring awareness about different methodological approaches that are available for studying ‘materiality’.
Session 33: Discussion
Assessment of Doctoral programs: Are we watching in HD?
Location: Fourth Floor, Columbia Room
Organizers: Linda Schamber (North Texas)
A number of organizations now collect "high-definition" or detailed data about iSchool PhD programs. How might these data be used to assess program quality?
Although iSchools have been doing an excellent job of doctoral education, they may soon be pushed to consider the picture in sharper detail. The iSchools are leading producers of doctoral graduates, many of whom serve on university faculties and thus strongly influence future research and practice in the information field (Sugimoto, Russell, & Grant, 2009). In May 2009 a number of iSchool representatives participated in wideranging conversations about curriculum, collaboration, funding, diversity, and other issues at the first Workshop on the Future of iSchool Doctoral Education at the University of Maryland (Jaeger et al., 2010).
Obviously the overriding goal is to achieve the highest quality doctoral programs and graduates. Little discussion appears to have taken place, however, on assessment of program quality; particularly discussion of criteria or standards that would pertain if the programs were accredited. But stay tuned! The HD show is about to start...
In 2006, the National Research Council began collecting data for its latest project to assess research doctorate programs in the U.S. On September 10, 2010 NRC will release a report containing data and rankings for 4,838 programs in 62 fields at 212 institutions. Although the universities of all 21 U.S. iSchools will be included, the iSchool doctoral programs will likely be absent because NRC currently lists information science only as an "emerging field" (National, 2010). Similar data-based initiatives are developing at state and regional levels. For example, in 2008, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board released "18 Characteristics of Texas Public Doctoral Programs" (Texas, 2008). The University of North Texas began collecting data on the 18 factors in Fall 2008 and plans for internal assessment of all its non-accredited degree programs— including doctoral—in the next few years.
Clearly the trend is to collect "high-def" data (so far all quantitative) that allow comparison of doctoral programs, and that these comparisons will lead to data-based ratings and rankings. The purpose of this iConference wildcard session is to jump-start the conversation about assessment of doctoral programs. It will begin with a brief presentation of assessment initiatives and the responses of iSchool deans and doctoral program coordinators to an informal poll about the issues. Possible discussion questions will be offered, such as:
- Initiatives: What doctoral program assessment initiatives are relevant to your university? How is your university responding to these initiatives? How is your iSchool responding?
- Data: What types of data are being collected? What types of data should be collected? Should iSchools develop their own criteria or standards for doctoral education? Future: What effect will ratings and rankings of iSchool doctoral programs have on the field? How can doctoral program assessments be leveraged to help iSchools advance strategically?
The discussion questions are not intended to be prescriptive, but rather to inspire open discussion.
Session 38: Panel
Funding Opportunities
Location: B Level, Superior Room
Organizers: Moderators Wayne G. Lutters (UMCB) and David W. McDonald (Washington). Panelists Susan Fussell, National Science Foundation (Cornell); Carleen F. Maitland, Office of International Science and Engineering (Penn State); Susan Winter, National Science Foundation (Portland State)
