From May 2 through May 8, 2010, libraries across the nation will celebrate Choose Privacy Week for the first time. This American Library Association campaign invites library professionals, users, and friends into a national conversation about privacy rights in a…
Read More Event: Emerging Privacy and Ethical Challenges for Libraries in the 2.0 Era
Special Topics in Information Science - The Search Engine Society: Search engines have become the center of gravity of our contemporary information society, providing a powerful interface for accessing the vast amount of information available on the World Wide Web and beyond. The audacious mission of Google, for example, is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Attaining such a goal necessarily results in significant changes to the ways in which information is created, stored, retrieved, and used. This course will critically examine the nature of search engines and their role in our information society, and reveal the unique challenges they bring to bear on information institutions, information policy, and information ethics.
This weekend I'm attending the 4th Access to Knowledge conference, A2K4: Access to Knowledge and Human Rights, hosted by the Yale Information Society Project (see my original post on the conference here). With the help of the UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies, I organized a workshop on "Identifying Challenges and Opportunities for an African Information Ethics", featuring Johannes Britz (School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee), Rafael Capurro (International Center for Information Ethics, and School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee) and Dennis Ocholla (University of Zululand), along with a very engaged group of conference participants.
I'm currently in Savannah, GA to participate in a workshop on Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research at CSCW 2010. This is my first time at CSCW, and looking at the set of papers…
Read More Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research
January 28, 2010 is Data Privacy Day. To celebrate, MichaelZimmer.org no longer uses any services that rely on web cookies or web bugs...
I am proposing a panel for Internet Research 11.0 titled "On the Philosophy of Facebook". Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has built his social networking empire on the belief that "information wants to be shared", a particular philosophy of information that directly impacts the values built into the design of Facebook, ranging from its user interface, privacy policies, terms of service, and method of governance. This panel will explore the philosophy of Facebook and its broader implications for norms of privacy, identity, governance, sociability, and online life generally.
The Yale Information Society Project has announced the 4th Access to Knowledge conference: A2K4: Access to Knowledge and Human Rights. The event will be held at Yale Law School on February 12-13, 2010, hosted by the Information Society Project, in collaboration with an extensive list of organizing partners, including UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies. The two-day conference will feature plenary panels as well as breakout sessions of working groups organized around specific issue areas, including a workshop I have organized on "Identifying Challenges and Opportunities for an African Information Ethics".
Given the renewed focus on full-body "backscatter" surveillance technology, I thought I'd highlight this poster a group of students created in my Spring 2009 "Information Technology Ethics" class (brief news story is here). Airport Surveillance Posterhttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=airportsurveillanceposter-091231140539-phpapp02&stripped_title=airport-surveillance-poster View more presentations from…
Read More Student Poster on Ethical Issues Related to Backscatter Airport Surveillance Technology
On Tuesday, a group of librarians and information professions will be holding a panel discussion on "The Challenges of Implementing Library 2.0 Services" at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). On the…
Read More Panel: On the Challenges of Implementing Library 2.0 Services
I'm pleased to announce that Dr. Rafael Capurro, an international expert in information ethics, is joining the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies as a Distinguished Researcher. Dr. Capurro's focus on intercultural information ethics -- as well as his…
Read More Rafael Capurro Joining UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies
MichaelZimmer.org 
You must be logged in to post a comment.