Collaboration in the Information Society

LIS 450: Collaboration in the Information Society

Michael Twidale

Course aims:

To introduce the concepts of collaborative learning and working
To consider how they are currently used in information structures and systems
To consider how they might be used in future systems
The course will use the idea of the digital library as a focus and source of examples for considering these issues and exploring their more general application

Course members will have the opportunity to focus on particular aspects of the topics that relate most closely to their person research interests. As a PhD level course, the course has an additional set of higher level goals of supporting the acquistion of skills necessary for independent research.

Themes

We shall consider how explicit support for collaboration between people can help them cope with the problems of making a transition to, and operating within the Information Society.

The following are some of the issues that we will touch upon (some in more detail than other)

What is, or might be, the Information Society?
Coping with immense volumes of information
Coping rapid rates of growth of information
Coping with constant, permanent and rapid change of technologies
How collaboration in various forms can address these issues
Computer Supported Collaborative Working
Computer Supported Collaborative Learning
same-time v different-time, same-place v different-place
Integrating learning about and working with information systems
Organisational Learning
Collaboration in information systems use
Searching for things and searching for people
Collaboration in physical libraries
Threats to and opportunities for improved collaboration in digital libraries
Systems that support explicit and implicit collaboration
Collaborative filtering
Supporting networks of people by networked computers
Answer Gardens and organisational memory
Information Visualisation
Help-giving, formal and informal
The use of meta-information: usage data, recommendations, annotations
Sharing of search process and product
Issues of privacy, security and ownership of information and meta-information
Implications for research agendas, methods and approaches

Contexts of use will include academic research, commercial organisations, social and personal use of information structures

The information structures considered will include digital libraries, the Web, corporate intranets and combinations of these and smaller scale information structures

To get a flavour of my particular interests, I suggest you look at my informal (and short!) position papers for the last two Allerton Workshops:

http://edfu.lis.uiuc.edu/allerton/95/

http://edfu.lis.uiuc.edu/allerton/96/s2/

And if you are that keen, try out the web pages of our project, Ariadne,

http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/cseg/projects/ariadne/

and in particular the paper "Browsing is a collaborative process" at the web site and soon (eventually!) to appear in revised form in Information Processing & Management.

In line with the content of the course and its level, it will be interactive in style. You will have the opportunity to apply some of the theoretical insights to concrete contexts of interest to you. We will consider various technical and social issues as well as those relating to user interface and systems design and evaluation. I do not expect you to have a background in all of these. As part of the course is about the formation and running of interdisciplinary teams, it is all to the good if we have a range of experiences with different people knowing a bit about such issues as ethnography, systems design, interface design/HCI, education, software engineering, multicultural and multilingual working, etc.

Provisional Bibliography