Student Posts: Information Policy Seminar ‘Public Scholarship’ Assignments

This week I attended the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), where the keynote address was given by Jorge Reina Schement, Dean of the School of Communication & Information, at Rutgers University. The address…

Fall 2010 Semester: New Classes, New Duties

The Fall 2010 semester has started at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and I'm excited to teach two new classes (of my own design) in the School of Information Studies: "Special Topics in Information Science: Search Engine Society" and "Doctoral Seminar: Information Policy". I've also been appointed director of SOIS's undergraduate program, the (newly-renamed) B.S. in Information Science and Technology. It will be a busy semester....

New Course: The Search Engine Society

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.