The Moonlighting Student

Courses Taken

November 12th, 2007 10:31 pm —  518 views

501 – Fall 2006 Use of Information 3 Credit(s) PEP: 1
Grade Received: A-
Ixchel M. Faniel and Judy S. Olson
Group Project: This course involves significant group work.

Engages students in the central professional and academic commitment of the School of Information: that better academic knowledge and better professional practice both rest on understanding the actual use of information in real-world environments. This course introduces students to frameworks, methods, and issues on information use in various levels of aggregation (individual, group, organization, and profession) and various contexts (work environments, community, and society). Students learn fundamental notions of information need, information behavior, knowledge construction associated with designing information systems, and services. Objectives of this course are:

  1. To become familiar with basic concepts related to information, information behavior, and information system and service
  2. To examine information needs and use in various contexts and various levels of aggregation
  3. To introduce approaches to qualitative methodology to assist in data collection
  4. To provide opportunities to practice the concepts and methods of information use in a real-world setting

504 – Fall 2006 Social Systems and Collections 3 Credit(s)
Grade Received: B+
Michael D. Cohen and Paul N. Edwards
Group Project: This course involves minor group work.

Considers collections of information resources in the broadest sense of the term. Includes libraries and archives, business records, research data, personal files, art collections, and other sets of information items held by individuals or groups for later use. Deepens understanding of fundamental social processes within which such collections are embedded, and the processes that shape their creation, use, and meaning. Fosters the synthesis of collections and social systems by showing how collected information simultaneously results from ongoing social processes and affects them.

502 – Winter 2007 Choice and Learning 3 Credit(s)
Grade Received: A-
Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Yan Chen

Course is about problem-solving. All cognitive activities are fundamentally problem solving in nature. Even non-problem activities (watching a movie) require problem solutions. For example, should you spend time at a movie or with girl/boyfriend? Should you rent or buy a house? We study decision-making about problems given current information and resources. In particular, how do humans make choices? How do human factors affect choices? What is the role of information? We also study learning; that is, how can we prepare to make better future choices? What information should we acquire? In studying these problems, we combine two different disciplines: cognitive psychology, which is descriptive, perceptual and heuristic; and economics, which uses normative, deliberate reasoning to solve well-defined problems without cognitive

503 – Winter 2007 Search and Retrieval 3 Credit(s)
Grade Received: A-
Lada A. Adamic and Suresh K. Bhavnani

Looks at search and retrieval in information systems as a continuous process, ranging from concepts and procedures integral to human-mediated search to the data structures and algorithms necessary to automate the search and retrieval process. Course is divided into three parts: What a searcher must know about an information retrieval system, data structures, and algorithms, and basic automatic techniques for search and retrieval.

682 – Fall 2007 Interface and Interaction Design 3 Credit(s) PEP: 1
Grade Received: A
Michael J. McQuaid
Group Project: This course involves significant group work.
Project: http://mitalkers.interspike.com

Provides an introduction to user-interface design from a design principles perspective. The course covers such topics as accessibility, design ethics, psychological principles, interaction principles, requirements analysis, project management, I/O devices, standards and style guides, and visual design principles. The perspective is a pragmatic, applied view of design, with frequent practical design exercises. The format of most classes is roughly half lecture and discussion and half in-class exercises.

689 – Fall 2007 Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 3 Credit(s) PEP: 1
Grade Received: A
Gary M. Olson
Group Project: This course involves significant group work.

An advanced course that explores the social, organizational, and technical issues involved in designing, developing, and deploying computational and communication tools to support the activities of groups and organizations. Students review a variety of research methods and conceptual frameworks that have guided CSCW work. Both classic and contemporary material is read and discussed. Students gain first-hand experience with a variety of tools through class demos and through a semester-long group project that evaluates an instance of a tool. Through this course, students:

  1. Understand the nature of social and organizational processes that are relevant to technology adoption and acceptance
  2. Learn about the different methods for studying social and organizational processes
  3. Become familiar with some of the major theoretical perspectives that have influenced CSCW researchers
  4. Know how to evaluate the success of a technology adoption in social or organizational terms
  5. Understand the changing and diverse nature of technological constraints that shape the kinds of applications and infrastructure that have been developed to support group and organizational activities
  6. Gain first-hand experience with the use of a variety of CSCW tools
  7. Understand the rapidly expanding marketplace in CSCW technologies

622 – Winter 2008 Evaluation of Systems and Services 3 Credit(s) PEP: 1
Grade Received: A
Mark Newman
Group Project: This course involves significant group work.

Covers the key concepts of evaluation and a variety of methods used to determine the goals of a system or service, performs organizational analysis, assesses task/technology or service fit, determines ease of learning of new or existing services or systems, determines ease of use, assesses aspects of performance (including information retrieval), and evaluates the success in accomplishing the user/organizational goals. Methods include observation, survey, interviews, performance analysis, evaluation in the design/iteration cycle, usability tests, and assessment of systems in use.

688 – Winter 2008 Fundamentals of Human Behavior 3 Credit(s)
Grade Received: A
Colleen Seifert

Surveys basic principles of cognitive and social psychology relevant to the design and use of information systems. Focuses on important findings in psychological science and their implications for the design and use of information systems. Topics include the basics of human perception, memory capacity and organization, the development of skill and expertise, and the characteristics of everyday reasoning and decision making. For example, a central problem in information science is how to label information stored for later recall. By examining how human memory operates, we can gain some insight into possible schemes that may be compatible with human users. This survey of what we know about the human mind offers ideas about how to exploit mental capacities in the design and use of information systems.

Each week in the course, students read original articles and discuss their content. For each session, students should come prepared with questions regarding the readings (~40 pages per week). Since no background in psychology is assumed, it is important that students actively identify unfamiliar concepts and raise questions in class. The instructor’s goal is to provide assistance and support as students learn to draw upon and integrate new scientific findings into their thinking about information use. Students are expected to actively participate in discussions, and through interactions in class, learn to draw connections from the research literature. Because class discussions are the core activity in the course, it is expected that students attend class regularly, contribute to the interactions, and complete assignments on time.

Each student writes a one-page reaction paper each week to help identify the relevance of the ideas from the readings. This paper describes a concrete illustration of a psychological principle and its implications for information systems. There is also a final project requiring the evaluation of a single existing information system using multiple principles of psychology discussed throughout the term. This project can be conducted individually or in small groups (two to four students working together) and the report should contain no more than 10 pages. Final grades for the course are a weighted average of participation (one third), short papers (one third), and the final project (one third). Students should feel free to discuss their progress in the course, along with any suggestions, with the instructor at any time.

601 – Fall 2008 Data Retrieval and Analysis Techniques 1.5 Credit(s)
Grade Received: A
Lada Adamic

Aims to help students get started with their own data harvesting, processing, and aggregation. Data analysis is crucial to evaluating and designing solutions and applications, as well as understanding users’ information needs and uses. In many cases, the data we need to access is distributed online among many Web pages, stored in a database or available in a large text file. Often these data ( e.g., Web server logs) are too large to obtain and/or process manually. Instead, we need an automated way to gather the data, parse it, and summarize it before we can do more advanced analysis. In this course, you will learn to use Perl and its modules to accomplish these tasks in a quick and easy yet useful and repeatable way. The companion half of this half-semester course, SI 618: “Exploratory Data Analysis,” teaches how to further glean insights from the data through analysis and visualization.

618 – Fall 2008 Exploratory Data Analysis 1.5 Credit(s)
Grade Received: A+
Michael J. McQuaid
Project: Documented homework assignments

Aims to help students get started with their own data acquisition and analysis. Data analysis is crucial to evaluating and designing solutions and applications as well as to understanding information needs and use. Students in this course (who will have just completed SI 601: “Data Manipulation”) will learn techniques of exploratory data analysis using scripting, text parsing, structured query language, regular expressions, graphing, and clustering methods to explore data. Students will be able to make sense of and see patterns in otherwise intractable quantities of data.

658 – Fall 2008 Information Architecture 3 Credit(s)
Grade Received: A-
Dan Klyn
Group Project: This course involves significant group work.

Librarians have been pioneering the practices and developing the core tools of information architecture for thousands of years. And while it’s true that there is no one official certification process or academic program for IA, an ALA- accredited library and/or information science degree continues to be one of the key credentials for IA practitioners.

The textbook for the course was written by two librarians who emerged from SI (then known as SILS) during the advent of the Web, and like them we’ll proceed into a world of online information and design and strategy from an unabashedly L/IS perspective.

529 – Winter 2009 eCommunities: Analysis and Design of Online Interaction Environments3 Credit(s)
Grade Received: A-
Professor Paul Resnick, GSI Sean Munson

Gives students a background in theory and practice surrounding online interaction environments. For the purpose of this course, a community is defined as a group of people who sustain interaction over time. The group may be held together by a common identity, a collective purpose, or merely by the individual utility gained from the interactions. An online interaction environment is an electronic forum, accessed through computers or other electronic devices, in which community members can conduct some or all of their interactions. The term eCommunity is used as shorthand, both for communities that conduct all of their interactions online and for communities that use online interaction to supplement face-to-face interactions.

Two main threads weave through the course, based on the two main texts. One thread is concerned with the practical issues of design and use of online tools to support communities, and how choices that must be made in design can impact the function and style of the resulting community. The second thread focuses on the sociological theory that provides a frame to better understand communities in general. These theoretical pieces provide a lens for better understanding the implications of choices made on the more practical level.


627 – Winter 2009 Managing the Information Technology Organization 3 Credit(s)
Grade Received: A
Professor S. Alan McCord
Group Project: This course involves group work.
Project: http://www.bblis.com

Most professionals are deeply involved with information technology throughout their careers. Many professionals elect to lead, or are asked to lead, an IT unit. This cross-disciplinary course introduces students to the skills needed to manage the modern IT organization. Students develop skills and techniques in the areas of technology assessment, strategic planning, budgeting and financing, human resources administration, IT operations, and leadership.

This course is designed to be cross-disciplinary, with examples and activities drawn from higher education, information services, manufacturing, health care, public administration and other areas. A variety of instructional methods are used to engage students and help identify similarities and differences between IT applications in various professional fields.


520 – Fall 2009 Graphic Design 3 Credit(s)
Grade Received: A+
Professor Elena Godin

This course aims to support professional development of SI students by exploring the art and science of visual communication. The conceptual part of the course enables students to improve/develop their aesthetic sensibilities and design skills through mastering visual language vocabularies, understanding principles of effective visual communications, and solving creative problems, while connecting these to technological, cultural, and social spheres. In the hands-on part of the course students gain necessary software skills, learn how to follow or establish identity guidelines, prepare work for print or Web production, and select the right tools, media, and budget for their projects. While studying the elements of layout, typography, illustration, color, and Web design, students build their design portfolio.

572 – Fall 2009 Database Application Design 3 Credit(s) PEP: 2
Grade Received: A
Professor Charles Antonelli
Group Project: This course involves significant group work.

This course is an introduction to database management systems (DBMS). It covers both theoretical and practical aspects of DBMS, including database design, use, and implementation using the database language SQL. Some topics in physical database design are also discussed. An essential part of the course is a programming project through which students design and develop a practical database system for library access, electronic commerce, information retrieval, or a similar application. Students use the open-source MySQL database and the PHP scripting language for Web development throughout the course.