Courses

This cross-cutting interdisciplinary course, taught jointly between the College of Information Studies and the Department of Computer Science, investigates the role that algorithms and automated decision-making systems play in markets, societies, and policymaking. The course connects policy and computational conceptualizations of transparency, security, fairness, privacy, manipulation, and accountability through a series of casestudies and burning debates. Students will collaborate cross-disciplinary and be encouraged to work through difficult trade-offs to reach consensus. By discussing recent applications of algorithms for social and consumer sorting, and the moderation and generation of content, students will engage with the pressing challenges and opportunities in the governance of and by algorithms.

This course provides an introduction to the design and implementation of participatory design approaches and participatory action research (PAR) as methods to inform adaptive leadership and create organizational change. The course will introduce PAR as an iterative cycle of research, action, and reflection, involving researchers and participants working together to understand a problematic workplace situation and change it for the better. The course will focus especially on PAR's capacity to create social change that promotes democracy and challenges inequality.

This course is an interdisplinary reading and discussion seminar.

Information Studies' eclectic interdisciplinarity is both its greatest strength and its most significant weakness. As an increasingly multi/inter/trans/non-disciplinary intellectual community, Information Studies embraces a wide variety of conceptual frameworks, theories, methodological approaches, and intellectual traditions. As such, it is necessary to be able to bring many different intellectual perspectives to bear on the complex, nuanced, phenomena that are its focus. The variety in the intellectual toolbox of Information Studies is central to its ability to avoid reduction of its focal topics to trite, simplistic characterizations. However, the field's paradigmatic richness places particular burdens on the individual researcher. The purpose of this seminar is to help students develop a reflective practice that they can rely on to turn their interests into valuable new insights in an interdisciplinary domain like Information Studies. 

Examines the theoretical and epistemological moorings of different types of qualitative research. Students apply selected field research methods to problems of professional practice in schools and communities while considering central issues and dilemmas that arise while engaging in fieldwork. 

This hands-on studio course will help students develop foundational visual skills related to user experience (UX) design. Students will explore methodologies and processes used in many of the industry's top creative environments and study the entire visual design skillset, including concept development, content creation, system design, and tools and process. 

An introduction to the academic life with a particular focus on what it means to undertake research, teaching, and service. 

Pursuing a doctorate in information studies involves the scholarly examination of the interaction between people, information, technology, and society. There are, however, as many ways to examine the interaction of people, information, technology, and society as there are researchers and ways of understanding what counts as evidence and knowledge in different components of the field. Students will be introduced to the diverse scholarly traditions that comprise information studies. Students will explore why there are so many ways of knowing and methods of discovery within the field, in order to help them identify the social theory and methods that will support their path through information scholarship.