Information Course Schedule spring 2015

This course explores the centrality of technology to processes of political transformation, starting from the tension between discourses of liberation and domination. We will study the interplay of computing with present struggles in the privatization of education, intellectual property, militarization, mass surveillance, labor, gender, sexuality, race, coloniality/decoloniality, and transnational activism. Questions to be addressed include: how do financial, legal, and algorithmic, and other domains of control shape global flows of information? How do old concepts in social theory (e.g., the ‘public sphere’) translate to the digital context? How can we propose technological interventions without reproducing naïve solutionism or false universalism?

This is a student-initiated group study course (DE-Cal). Please contact the student coordinator(s) for specific questions.

Must be taken on a passed/not passed basis. Students who previously completed The Politics of Digital Piracy (Info 98/Info 198) will receive no credit for Discourse on Computing.

Surveying history through the lens of information and information through the lens of history, this course looks across time to consider what might distinguish ours as “the information age” and what that description implies about the role of “information technology” across time. We will select moments in societies’ development of information production, circulation, consumption, and storage from the earliest writing and numbering systems to the world of Social Media. In every instance, we’ll be concerned with what and when, but also with how and why. Throughout we will keep returning to questions about how information-technological developments affect society and vice versa?

With the advent of virtual communities and online social networks, old questions about the meaning of human social behavior have taken on renewed significance. Using a variety of online social media simultaneously, and drawing upon theoretical literature in a variety of disciplines, this course delves into discourse about community across disciplines. This course will enable students to establish both theoretical and experiential foundations for making decisions and judgments regarding the relations between mediated communication and human community. Also listed as Sociology C167.

This course explores the centrality of technology to processes of political transformation, starting from the tension between discourses of liberation and domination. We will study the interplay of computing with present struggles in the privatization of education, intellectual property, militarization, mass surveillance, labor, gender, sexuality, race, coloniality/decoloniality, and transnational activism. Questions to be addressed include: how do financial, legal, and algorithmic, and other domains of control shape global flows of information? How do old concepts in social theory (e.g., the ‘public sphere’) translate to the digital context? How can we propose technological interventions without reproducing naïve solutionism or false universalism?

This is a student-initiated group study course (DE-Cal). Please contact the student coordinator(s) for specific questions.

Must be taken on a passed/not passed basis. Students who previously completed The Politics of Digital Piracy (Info 98/Info 198) will receive no credit for Discourse on Computing.

This course is designed to be an introduction to the topics and issues associated with information and information technology and its role in society. Throughout the semester we will consider both the consequence and impact of technologies on social groups and on social interaction and how society defines and shapes the technologies that are produced. Students will be exposed to a broad range of applied and practical problems, theoretical issues, as well as methods used in social scientific analysis. The four sections of the course are: 1) theories of technology in society, 2) information technology in workplaces 3) automation vs. humans, and 4) networked sociability.

This course uses examples from various commercial domains — retail, health, credit, entertainment, social media, and biosensing/quantified self — to explore legal and ethical issues including freedom of expression, privacy, research ethics, consumer protection, information and cybersecurity, and copyright. The class emphasizes how existing legal and policy frameworks constrain, inform, and enable the architecture, interfaces, data practices, and consumer facing policies and documentation of such offerings; and, fosters reflection on the ethical impact of information and communication technologies and the role of information professionals in legal and ethical work.

As information becomes increasingly strategic for all organizations, technology professionals must also develop the core business skills required to build personal brand, expand influence, build high-quality relationships, and deliver on critical enterprise projects. Using a combination of business and academic readings, case discussions and guest speakers, this course will explore a series of critical business topics that apply to both start-up and Fortune 500 enterprises. Subjects include: communication and presentation skills, software and product development methodologies, negotiation skills, employee engagement, organizational structures and career paths, successful interviewing, and CV preparation.

This course addresses concepts and methods of user experience research, from understanding and identifying needs, to evaluating concepts and designs, to assessing the usability of products and solutions. We emphasize methods of collecting and interpreting qualitative data about user activities, working both individually and in teams, and translating them into design decisions. Students gain hands-on practice with observation, interview, survey, focus groups, and expert review. Team activities and group work are required during class and for most assignments. Additional topics include research in enterprise, consulting, and startup organizations, lean/agile techniques, mobile research approaches, and strategies for communicating findings.

Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: Graduate standing. As it's generally used, "information" is a collection of notions, rather than a single coherent concept. In this course, we'll examine conceptions of information based in information theory, philosophy, social science, economics, and history. Issues include: How compatible are these conceptions; can we talk about "information" in the abstract? What work do these various notions play in discussions of literacy, intellectual property, advertising, and the political process? And where does this leave "information studies" and "the information society"?

Three hours of lecture per week. This course applies economic tools and principles, including game theory, industrial organization, information economics, and behavioral economics, to analyze business strategies and public policy issues surrounding information technologies and IT industries. Topics include: economics of information goods, services, and platforms; economics of information and asymmetric information; economics of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data privacy, and peer production; strategic pricing; strategic complements and substitutes; competition and antitrust; Internet industry structure and regulation; network cascades, network formation, and network structure.

Three hours of lecture per week. Introduction to legal issues in information management, antitrust, contract management, international law including intellectual property, trans-border data flow, privacy, libel, and constitutional rights.

The design and presentation of digital information. Use of graphics, animation, sound, visualization software, and hypermedia in presenting information to the user. Methods of presenting complex information to enhance comprehension and analysis. Incorporation of visualization techniques into human-computer interfaces. Three hours of lecture and one hour of laboratory per week.

Three hours of seminar per week. How does the design of new educational technology change the way people learn and think? How do we design systems that reflect our understanding of how we learn? This course explores issues on designing and evaluating technologies that support creativity and learning. The class will cover theories of creativity and learning, implications for design, as well as a survey of new educational technologies such as works in computer supported collaborative learning, digital manipulatives, and immersive learning environments. Also listed as New Media C263.

This course will cover new interface metaphors beyond desktops (e.g., for mobile devices, computationally enhanced environments, tangible user interfaces) but will also cover visual design basics (e.g., color, layout, typography, iconography) so that we have systematic and critical understanding of aesthetically engaging interfaces. Students will get a hands-on learning experience on these topics through course projects, design critiques, and discussion, in addition to lectures and readings. Two hours of lecture per week.

New Venture Discovery introduces students to the process of launching an information-intensive venture — a social enterprise, business startup, or venture inside an established organization. It is motivated by the recognition that new enterprises fail more often from lack of customers than flaws in technology or product development. The course takes an iterative, design-oriented, and feedback-driven approach to the search process: identifying a problem or need to address, developing a prototype, discovering customers, refining the concept, testing and validating demand, and developing a sustainable business model.

This is an introductory course on design, problem solving and innovation. While the principles generalize to any context, this course focuses on solutions that take the form of digital goods and services.

This is a team-based, experiential learning course. Students who take this course should expect to:

• Work with a team that includes different backgrounds, interests, and personal motivations. As a cross-listed course, teams may or may not include students from different schools across the University (depending upon enrollment).

• Experience a process for identifying and prioritizing opportunities to innovate. The process scales from an entrepreneur working alone to Fortune 500 firms managing an innovation portfolio.

• Practice applying qualitative processes (including customer interviews, paper prototyping, and remote user-testing) to characterize the "job to be done," isolate a "minimum viable problem," and iterate your design prototypes.

• Practice applying quantitative processes (including analysis of keyword searches, digital ad campaigns, and funnel analysis) to characterize the "job to be done," isolate a "minimum viable problem," and iterate your design prototypes.

• Formulate hypotheses and then design and execute experiments in a Lean cycle of build, measure and learn.

Teams will learn general principles of product/service design in the context of tools, methods, and concepts specific to the Web-based environment. Both desktop and mobile products and services are prototyped in the Web context to leverage common development and testing resources. For purposes of the course, the product or service should be aimed at consumers in the range 25 - 45. We define this target audience so that we can use classmates as preliminary subjects of interviews, testing, and surveys. For the purposes of this course, the product or service need not have a compelling business model. The focus is on creating a product or service that solves a real problem, not necessarily creating a new business.

This course teaches a process-oriented approach to product and service design with heavy emphasis on user experience design. Students interested in design aesthetics, semiotics and cognitive psychology should look elsewhere. Neither is this a class about technology. The course syllabus does not include tutorials on specific software packages. Students interested in technical questions such as platform selection and scaling should look elsewhere.

This course considers at the Internet of Things (IoT) as the general theme of real-world things becoming increasingly visible and actionable via Internet and Web technologies. The goal of the course is to take a top-down as well as a bottom-up approach, thereby providing students with a comprehensive understanding of the IoT: from a technical viewpoint as well as considering the societal and economic impact of the IoT.

By looking at a variety of real-world application scenarios of the IoT and diverse implemented applications, the various understandings and requirements of IoT applications become apparent. This allows students to understand what IoT technologies are used for today, and what is required in certain scenarios. By looking at a variety of existing and developing technologies and architectural principles, students gain a better understanding of the types of technologies that are available and in use today and can be utilized to implement IoT solutions. Finally, students will be given the opportunity to apply these technologies to tackle scenarios of their choice in teams of two or three, using an experimental platform for implementing prototypes and testing them as running applications. At the end of the semester, all project teams will present their completed projects.

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

In this course you’ll learn industry-standard agile and lean software development techniques such as test-driven development, refactoring, pair programming, and specification through example. You’ll also learn good object-oriented programming style. We’ll cover the theory and principles behind agile engineering practices, such as continuous integration and continuous delivery.

This class will be taught in a flip-the-classroom format, with students programming in class. We'll use the Java programming language. Students need not be expert programmers, but should be enthusiastic about learning to program. Please come to class with laptops, and install IntelliJ IDEA community edition. Students signing up should be comfortable writing simple programs in Java (or a Java-like language such as C#).

This course is currently offered as Info 254. Data Mining and Analytics.

The goal of Data Mining and Analytics is to introduce students to the practical fundamentals of data mining and machine learning with just enough theory to aid intuition building. The course is project-oriented, with a project beginning in class every Thursday and to be completed outside of class by the following week, or two weeks for longer assignments. The in class portion of the project is meant to be collaborative and a time for the instructor to work closely with groups to understand the learning objectives and help them work through any logistics that may be slowing them down. Tuesdays are lecture days which introduce the concepts and algorithms which will be used in the upcoming project. The primary objective is for everyone to leave the class with hands-on data mining and data engineering skills they can confidently apply. Knowledge of basic python programming is a strong prerequisite for this course.

One hour colloquium per week. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Prerequisites: Ph.D. standing in the School of Information. Colloquia, discussion, and readings designed to introduce students to the range of interests of the school.

Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies.  Two to four hours of seminar per week. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor. Topics in information management and systems and related fields. Specific topics vary from year to year. May be repeated for credit, with change of content.

Topics in information management and systems and related fields. Specific topics vary from year to year. May be repeated for credit, with change of content. May be offered as a two semester sequence.

The Internet has emerged as a crucial platform for freedom of expression and the exchange of ideas and information. Access to an open Internet offers an opportunity for a global citizenry to freely communicate, collaborate, and exchange ideas. This participatory class offers the chance to study issues, challenges, theory, and practice in the realm of Internet freedom. We will focus on real-world case studies of the Internet mobilizing people by spreading alternative views and news; the parallel emergence of collective identity and civic action; Internet censorship; and technologies used to evade surveillance and filtering. We will also study the technical challenges of measuring and assessing digital repression, designing anti-censorship tools that have trust, scalability, and usability, as well as related privacy and security issues. Students will do individual or group projects relating to the concepts and themes discussed in this course.

This research seminar class is not limited to the graduate students in the School of Information; students from other departments on campus, including undergraduates, are welcome.

Topics in information management and systems and related fields. Specific topics vary from year to year. May be repeated for credit, with change of content. May be offered as a two semester sequence.

Topics in information management and systems and related fields. Specific topics vary from year to year. May be repeated for credit, with change of content. May be offered as a two semester sequence.

Group projects on special topics in information management and systems.

This course takes a multidisciplinary, hands-on approach to exploring the sociotechnical practices and political-economic issues involved in building wireless networks in rural and under-resourced areas. Students will be introduced to a large-scale wireless network under development on the scenic South Mendocino coast, and will have the opportunity to devise a semester-long project in their fields of interest. This course is of particular relevance to students in the following disciplines: computer science, electrical-engineering, business management, anthropology, sociology, political science, public policy, international relations, and education.