Monnee Tong, MLIS '12, recognized as ALA Emerging Leader

Friday, April 4, 2014

Monnee Tong, a librarian at the San Diego Public Library, was named an American Library Association 2014 Emerging Leader. Tong, who graduated from the iSchool MLIS program in 2012, says her goals as an Emerging Leader are to "be a more informed and articulate advocate for libraries and librarians, to learn more about being a leader, and to meet lots of intelligent and inspiring professionals!" The Emerging Leaders initiative began in 1997 as a one-year program under former ALA President Mary R. Somerville and revived in 2006 under former ALA President Leslie Burger. It was established to re

Katie Davis: Science-themed music videos boost scientific literacy

Thursday, April 3, 2014

As the United States puts ever-greater emphasis on science, technology, engineering and mathematics education to keep competitive in the global economy, schools are trying to figure out how to improve student learning in science. University of Washington researchers Katie Davis and Greg Crowther think music may be the answer for some kids. They studied the ability of music videos to enhance students' understanding of scientific concepts. Davis will present "Sing about Science: Leveraging the Power of Music to Improve Science Education" on Friday (April 4) at the American Educational Rese

Katie Davis interviewed on KUOW

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Bill Radke interviewed Assistant Professor Katie Davis about her book "The App Generation" for KUOW, a public radio station supported by the University of Washington. Davis will speak at Town Hall Seattle on April 23.  Interview excerpt:  I begin and end my days with technology. My iPhone alarm goes off, I check the news and email, I stream the radio, I surf the web by day, and I fall asleep to the sound of my white noise app. Are people like me just modern, or are we app-dependent? Katie Davis is an assistant professor at the Universit

Mike Eisenberg, founding dean of the iSchool, to retire

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Dean Harry Bruce's message for the spring edition of iNews  Dean Emeritus and Professor Michael Eisenberg has announced his intention of retiring in December. That means that this past quarter—Winter 2014—was his final teaching quarter. It gives me pause to think we will soon be without his inspiring and enthusiastic presence. As many alumni are aware, Professor Eisenberg is the “founding dean” of the University of Washington Information School. He is the visionary brought in by the UW to transform this school into a worldwide model for information education and research.

Mike Showalter: Nontraditional librarian

Monday, March 24, 2014

Information School alumnus Mike Showalter is living proof that the capabilities engendered by library science extend far beyond the traditional “librarian” role. Showalter is now a director of product management at Seattle-based Serials Solutions and counts many librarians among his customers. While this may seem little removed from his Master of Librarianship roots, it belies the unusual path he followed in reaching this point. After earning his degree in 1992, Showalter was both witness and participant in librarianship helping shape today’s high tech landscape. This includes th

Informatics students win 2014 Shobe prize

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Katlyn Edwards, Carlo Valentin, Phill Pasqual, Kartik Rishi, and Kendall Morgan (pictured left to right), all seniors in the iSchool Informatics program, pooled their talents to create Fidgt, a better way to interact with wearable devices, such as Google Glass or Pebble Smartwatch. Team Fidgt won the 2014 Shobe Prize, sharing the honors with Disco, a team  of students from Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE). “The inspiration really came from us taking a moment to look critically at how the wearable device market was developing. We realized that there is a gap in

Hold that RT: Much misinformation tweeted after 2013 Boston Marathon bombing

Monday, March 17, 2014

It takes only a fraction of a second to hit the retweet button on Twitter. But if thousands of people all retweet at once, a piece of information 140 characters long can go viral almost instantly in today’s Internet landscape. If that information is incorrect, especially in a crisis, it’s hard for the social media community to gain control and push out accurate information, new research shows. University of Washington researchers have found that misinformation spread widely on Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing despite efforts by users to correct rumors that were inaccura

IMLS $100K grant to fund iLab

Thursday, March 13, 2014

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is granting the iSchool $100,000 to invite 60 librarians, researchers, and innovators to a national leadership forum in October on digital youth. The inaugural Digital Youth (DY) iLab will strengthen the emerging interdisciplinary community of digital youth researchers, designers, industry leaders, professionals, and policymakers and help position library and information science disciplines as leading voices within this community. Eliza ​Dresang, Beverly Cleary Professor of children and youth services, is the project director. 

Academic Standards Network: An iSchool success story

Friday, March 7, 2014

In 1996, University of Washington Information School (iSchool) Professors Stuart Sutton and Mike Eisenberg, then at the Syracuse University, wanted to solve an information problem: How do you effectively map K-12 learning resources, like teachers’ lessons plans, to state academic standards so educators could find and use them in the classroom? “At that time, competency frameworks were becoming more and more critical to effectively designing learning experiences and resources that met K-12 student needs and in assessing whether what a student should be learning had been learned,” says

iSchool faculty and students to present at CHI 2014

Thursday, March 6, 2014

The Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) will take place in Toronto, April 26-May 1. It is touted as the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction. iSchool faculty and doctoral students will present papers, notes, and participate in workshops at this year’s conference. MSIM students from Professor Hazel Taylor’s IMT 540 fall 2013 course were one of 12 teams accepted to the very competitive CHI 2014 Student Design Competition. Papers Beating the Bubble: Using Kinematic Triggering in the Bubble Lens for Acquiri

MLIS student selected for RUSA Award

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Katharine Macy is the recipient of a Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) 2014 achievement award. RUSA provides research and travel grants to “the nation’s most exceptional librarians, libraries and projects involving reference services.” Macy, a second-year MLIS student, was given a travel award to attend the ALA Annual Conference. The award is sponsored by Gale Cengage Learning. She was cited for her "great potential to become a successful business librarian." "I'm honored that RUSA BRASS chose me to be the recipient of this award, and I'm very excited to attend this co

Jacob Wobbrock receives Google Faculty Research Award

Monday, March 3, 2014

iSchool Associate Professor Jacob O. Wobbrock will receive a 2014-15 Google Research Award for his proposal, “Smart Touch: Improving the accessibility of touch screens on Android tablets and smartphones for people with motor impairments.”  iSchool Ph.D. student Martez Mott will work with Wobbrock on the project. This year, Google received 691 proposals from 46 countries on 6 continents, and made 115 awards, for a 16.6% award rate. “With this award, we will be able to develop software for a fundamentally more accessible kind of touch screen,” said Wobbrock. “Our research wi

David Levy interviewed for NPR about technology and disconnection

Friday, February 28, 2014

At weddings, guests tweet real-time photos of the festivities to friends far away. At sporting events, fans follow scores of games in other cities. In classrooms, students text with friends in other classes and parents out in the world. At funerals, mourners send out selfies to pals in other places. Everyone, it seems, is interacting more with people who are elsewhere — and less with the people around them. As technology seeps through society, dampening every dry aspect of our lives, something is happening to: the idea of being present; the desire to be in the moment; the notion of living

iSchool entrepreneur creates software to automate content analysis

Friday, February 28, 2014

Website professionals have traditionally spent weeks, sometimes months, hunched over computers, manually clicking page-by-page through sites, digging into and documenting content, cutting and pasting and posting results on spreadsheets to create content inventories. Even experts who consider the work critical to understanding website content have described it as a “tedious,” “laborious,” and “mind-numbing” process. Paula Land, ’04 graduate of the iSchool’s Master of Science in Information Management program, had a better idea. Three years ago the trailblazing content stra

UW iSchool to make a strong showing at 2014 iConference Berlin

Friday, February 21, 2014

Faculty and students from the University of Washington had more papers accepted at this year’s iConference than any of the more than 50 schools who are members of the iSchools organization. The conference, to be held in Berlin on March 4 – 7, is the 10th annual gathering of a broad spectrum of scholars and researchers from around the world who share a common concern about critical information issues in contemporary society. Each annual iConference is hosted by a different iSchools member-institution. This is the first time the conference will be held outside of North America. Papers