Just back from a fascinating presentation by Aaron Marcus on the importance of culture-centered design. He was a guest here of the ASIST Student Chapter at the iSchool and spoke for almost two hours with questions from the audience. His work leans heavily on Hofstede’s model of cultural dynamics, which he acknowledges has several weaknesses, [...]
Then check this out - get your real accredited degree through second life. As one of the instructors put it, without a hint of sarcasm, some people are not very comfortable with their first life so……
Outgoing ALA president Leslie Burger announced a new presidential task force this summer to synthesize the ongoing efforts by ALA to advance LIS education (I am choosing my words carefully here). Its workings are somewhat mysterious but presumably we will be told more when it reports next year. It’s membership includes former presidents Michael [...]
Interesting piece the other morning on NPR about tomb raiders who plunder historical treasures and sell them. Nothing new here but one aspect of the story really jarred. Seems an international treaty set up in 1970 forms the dividing line between what is acceptable for museums and rich collectors to purchase and what is not. [...]
The latest issue contains an interesting conversation between various design thinkers and practitioners that makes reference to the emergence of information architecture as a field (nextd.org/02/10/2/index.html). I love this quote from Peter Jones:
“Information architecture was more of an activity before 2000, now it’s a well-defined field of practice making aggressive inroads into i-schools, (if not [...]
Last year I wrote about the search for a sexier topics among computer science types that it was hoped would renew student interest in the field. The latest data indicates that interest in CS as a major appears to have dropped 70% in recent years. Data to be released March 1st by CRA will reveal [...]
I moderated a panel of deans at ASIST 2006, all there to discuss the iSchool movement (formerly ‘project’, now ‘caucus’). Panelists were Ray von Dran of Syracuse, Olivia Frost of Michigan, Jim Thomas of PSU, Michelle Cloonan of Simmons, and Linda Smith of Illinois. Almost 100 people turned up at 8am Monday morning to engage [...]
I attended a closed-shop symposium at UT this week on the future of the academic library (www.utexas.edu/president/symposium/index.html). The two opening addresses, by James Duderstadt, former President of the University of Michigan) and Clifford Lynch (of CNI) were models of insightful, powerpoint-free talks that took us through a range of future scenarios (definitely plural!) suggesting major [...]
First it was a one-off hot topic meeting organized by ASIST. Then is became a regular conference. Last year the first European IA Summit was launched with a second to follow this year. The IA world expands further with another new conference, OzIA 2006, to be held Sept 30th/Oct 1st in Sydney, Australia. Why Australia [...]
There is much interest in attracting new students, especially female, to computer science and it has not gone unnoticed by some in that discipline that there is a real image problem. The Computer Research Association, a grouping of some 200 academic departments in computer science and engineering, is doing its best to put the sex [...]