Master of Science in Information

[John Maloney ( http://kmblogs.com/ )]

ANN ARBOR, Mich., March 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Facebook. YouTube. Wikipedia. Flickr. They're the user-created stuff of Web 2.0 -- also known as social computing -- that have changed the way people interact with computers and each other.

Developing a formal understanding of the underlying dynamics at play and the critical technology choices has required a patchwork of academic courses at a select few institutions.

Now the University of Michigan School of Information (SI) offers students the nation's first graduate-degree specialization in social computing through the Master of Science in Information.

SI faculty have been leaders in inventing and analyzing many of the underlying techniques that have powered the rise of social computing, including recommender systems, reputation systems, prediction markets, social network analysis, online communities, and computer-supported cooperative work.

The specialization is one of nine the School offers -- six of which are newly launched -- that prepare students for careers in long-established and newly emerging fields.

"Our specializations give students more choice and more flexibility than ever before," says Judy Lawson, director of academic and career services. "They also respond to the needs of organizations in hot fields like social computing. Employers want graduates with a deep understanding of how to manage information and at the same time make it easily accessible to users. SI is staying ahead of the curve."

In addition to Social Computing, the School offers specializations in:

-- Incentive-Centered Design -- Teaches the art of designing systems or institutions to align individual incentives with overall organizational goals. It draws deeply from economics, psychology, and sociology, with computer science as a unifying thread.

-- Community Informatics -- Prepares students for positions as public interest information professionals and technical leaders for nonprofit organizations, government agencies, community development agencies, and entrepreneurial social ventures.

-- Information Analysis and Retrieval -- Teaches how information is stored in computer systems, how it is searched and analyzed, and how humans access it.

-- Preservation of Information -- Identifies preservation challenges and standards-based preservation practices and responds to the urgent need for expertise in preservation, digital curation, and Web archiving.

-- Information Policy -- Prepares students to analyze and design information policy at both the organizational and general public policy level.

-- Library and Information Services -- Prepares students for all aspects of librarianship. Students may also choose a track for careers in K-12 school media.

-- Archives and Records Management -- Teaches concepts and techniques to manage historical materials as well as methods that can be applied in information systems design to support integrity, authenticity, access, and long-term preservation of records.

-- Human-Computer Interaction -- Educates the professional who designs and develops technologies that fit the organization and work practices, the work to be done, and the capabilities of the user.

The multidisciplinary School of Information has a rich history of innovative teaching and path-breaking research. The School also offers dual master's degrees in business, law, medicine, nursing, public policy, and social work, and a Ph.D. in information.

Details about the School are available at si.umich.edu/go or by calling (734) 763-2285.

Website: http://si.umich.edu/

[Tibaut houzanme]

Thanks John for sharing this information.

 

For all of us that have an interest in the information management(access-storage-use-safegard-redesign) for efficient use or competitive advantage, the new Master of Ann Arbor represents the tip of the iceberg for what we should call the overhaul of the Information Management discipline.

 

The new offering responds to a changing or evolving society with differents needs to be adressed. And all the capabilities of the traditional disciplines and the inovative ones are there and can be combined in a specific harmonic way to design a new field. And this trend, noticed in the offerings of the University of Michigan and many other leading colleges (Drexel, Utexas, Simmons College, Indiana University among many others) are part of the iSchool movement-caucus-consortium.

 

As a Information Professional interested in many specialities, I just wonder when it will be possible for the student to completely design his own degree by taking a-la-carte courses from the best colleges in each of the revolutionary and traditional speciality.

 

Always good to observe these changes and participate in them.

 

Regards

Ulrich Tibaut Houzanme

--

Information Professional:

Kowledge Manamement

Competitive Intelligence

tibaut_...@yahoo.com

[Robert Holley]

The WISE consortium among the iSchools allows students to take online courses at the other institutions while registering and paying at their home school. I don’t believe that this is quite the wide open choice as described below, but it’s a start. While my school is still proud to be an lSchool (library school), we have beefed up our information science component and may be interested in participating in WISE.

 

There is still significant demand for librarians, albeit often tech-savvy librarians, so that my school has seen a big increase in enrollment to provide graduates for the traditional jobs that still exist in the field. Smaller public, school, and even academic libraries don’t have the big bucks to be on the cutting edge of technology and need librarians who have mastered the traditional skills.

 

Robert P. Holley

Professor, Library & Information Science Program

Wayne State University

Detroit, MI 48202

313-577-4021 (phone)

313-577-7563 (fax)

aa3...@wayne.edu (email)

 

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<BR