Course Schedule: Fall 1999

Three hours of lecture per week. The impact of information and information systems, technology, practices, and artifacts on how people organize their work, interact, and understand experience. Social issues in information systems design and management: assessing user needs, involving users in system design, and understanding human-computer interaction and computer-mediated work and communication. Use of law and other policies to mediate the tension between free flow and constriction of information.

Designing and managing effective information systems requires an understanding of the circumstances of their use: real people use them for specific purposes under specific circumstances. Information systems (computer-based and traditional) both shape and are shaped by their users and their context. In the first half of this course, we consider the social nature of information and information systems, and their design and use as part of how people make sense out of their worlds, interact with one another, and coordinate action across time and space. We consider such issues as the social construction of information; knowledge communities (including organizations) and the collaborative nature of knowledge; the self and community in an electronic world; assessing user needs; involving users in system design; and issues in human-computer interaction, and computer-supported cooperative work.

Designing and managing effective information systems also requires having a larger understanding of law and policy issues arising from the uses of information. Sometimes these laws, especially intellectual property laws, provide important sources of protection against unauthorized uses or appropriations of information. Sometimes, as with state privacy and federal encryption regulations, the law places limits on what uses can be made of information or what kinds of security systems can be used to protect information. Sometimes, codes of conduct within an industry also constrain the freedom of firms to do whatever they want with information. Because information law and policy is evolving at a fairly rapid pace in response to new technologies, it is important to have a sense of some of the larger information policy debates going on at national and international levels, such as those requiring libraries to filter content and those concerning privacy, because what is a policy debate now may turn out to be a regulation or a broader rule at a later time. As information becomes the principal commodity of the information economy, traditional "freedom of information" policies need to be adjusted.

This course is required of all entering SIMS students and serves as an introduction to other courses in the curriculum treating these issues in greater depth.

Computing and information technology are dramatically changing peoples' lives, and more change is to come. The promise of ubiquitous computing is that people will be assisted by computers in many new ways, and will interact with them naturally, on the human's rather than the machine's terms. Computing research today is about new ways of connecting people to computers, people to knowledge, people to the physical world, and people to people. Computers must function in human contexts, rather than requiring people to learn and follow the machine's rules. That requires a thorough understanding of those contexts. HCC is an interdisciplinary program involving sociology, psychology, and education theory as well as computer science and engineering. Its goal is to study social contexts and human behavior, to design and evaluate computer applications in those contexts. HCC can be viewed as an evolution of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), but represents a shift in perspective. HCC is not an area within computer science, but represents a theme that impacts all areas of CS. It coincides with the transition of computing from tools built for and by professionals to tools for everyday tasks for "every citizen". Understanding the complexity and diversity of human behavior will be an important first step in building the future "killer applications" of computing.

The course includes talks by leading researchers from on and off campus on HCC-related topics. The talks are about current research, but are colloquium-style and accessible to a broad audience. The goal is to allow graduate students from one of the participating areas to undertake research that cuts across the HCC areas, or to partner with students from other HCC fields.

The seminar explores selected advanced topics relating to 'digital libraries' with special emphasis on:

• Access to networked resources
• Use of two or more resources in conjunction
• Combined use of two or more retrieval systems (e.g. use of pre- or post-processing to enhance the capabilities)
• The redesign of library services

It is expected that these issues will require attention to a number of questions about the nature of information retrieval processes, the feasibility of not-yet-conventional techniques, techniques of making different systems work together, social impact, and the reconsideration of past practices. More generally, the seminar is intended to provide a forum for advanced students in the School. Anyone interested in these topics is welcome to join in -- and to talk about their own work. This is a continuation of the previous Lynch/Buckland seminars.