Advancing knowledge and practice wherever people interact with information and technology

Online education has been a growing phenomenon over the past decade. Then, in the blink of an eye, the COVID-19 pandemic forced almost all schooling to go online as the nation sheltered-in-place. This brought to the forefront some long-term studies being conducted by three School of Information researchers, Associate Professor Jenna Burrell, Ph.D. student Anne Jonas, and Assistant Adjunct Professor Morgan G. Ames, who explore inequality and digitization in educational spaces. Their work has revealed that devices alone don’t facilitate learning and WiFi doesn’t automatically create access.

Incoming 5th Year MIDS student Christina Carr was chosen as the inaugural recipient of the Sharon X. Lin & Andrew R. Bullen Graduate Fellowship in Data Science for the 2020–21 academic year. The award supports students in the Master’s of Information and Data Science program who show a commitment to gender equity within the program. 

Passionate about math and science from an early age, Sharon was raised by a single mother who encouraged her daughters to value education, which was one of the reasons the couple decided to fund a fellowship to benefit gender equity in the MIDS program. “Female representation, encouraging minorities to go into STEM, helping people from lower-income brackets — I want all of these people to thrive in the STEM environment!” Lin said.