'Smart girls always have options'

Friday, April 10, 2015

Tammara Combs walked into her dissertation defense at the iSchool with a 2-year-old in wet diapers and a patient 4-year-old who, at meeting’s end, walked up to Combs’ adviser and said “Thank you for helping my Mom save people.” The boy extended his hand for a gentlemanly shake. The year was 2008, and Combs, a lifelong math lover, had beaten all the odds in earning her Ph.D. She was a single mother, recently divorced, and a minority working full-time at Microsoft, where she was a rising star, mining and crunching data on newsgroups and their conversation threads. In her spare time, s

Annie Searle in Risk Universe: Dear member of the board

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Whether you’re a board member of a retailer like Starbucks or sitting on a large financial services board like JPMorgan Chase, I’ll bet you’re pleased at this point that you said no to SONY board membership.  Though Enron is now nearly 13 years behind us, you may recall the U.S. Senate subcommittee finding that ultimately led to the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOx) Act in 2002, that “the Enron Board of Directors failed to safeguard Enron shareholders and contributed to the collapse of the seventh largest public company in the United States, by allowing Enron to engage in high r

Informatics alum creates best-selling app for teachers

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Many teachers might feel a bit challenged if they found themselves parenting a newborn and studying for National Certification Boards at the same time. For David Lowe, Informatics ’04, that situation was a blessing in disguise. “Back in 2009, I needed something to do — besides the Boards — while rocking a baby to sleep in a dark room every night. I started thinking about how my classroom note-taking systems weren’t working,” said Lowe, who earned his masters in teaching at Seattle University. “The notes were hard to maintain, and it was way too cumbersome to try and get good s

Katie Davis receives 2015 NSF CAREER Award

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Katie Davis, assistant professor at the UW iSchool, has received the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation. The award will provide Davis with $759,462 over five years to investigate how networked technologies can be leveraged to develop learners’ STEM identities and connect their STEM learning across informal and formal contexts. The project, “Digital Badges for STEM Education,” will develop and implement a digital badge system to recognize and reward the skills and achievements of a diverse group of high school students parti

Joe Janes: One size LIS does not fit all

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

I’ve heard the “what are they teaching in library school these days, anyway?” comments for as long as I’ve been an educator; it comes with the territory. It’s natural, and healthy, that all of us are invested in the process by which people become members of our profession. However, in the last few years, another couple of tropes have entered the fray: that there are too many students in our programs and that the number is growing, that there aren’t enough jobs for them, and that students and recent graduates feel betrayed and even lied to as a result. That has extended, in some con

Miriam Heard interviewed for CALL Bulletin

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Miriam Heard works for the Pritzker Legal Research Center at Northwestern University, and is enrolled in the MLIS program at the University of Washington Information School. I recently had a chat with Miriam for the Chicago Association of Law Libraries (CALL) Bulletin, so we could all get to know her a little better. Kara Dunn (KD): Welcome to CALL, Miriam! Are you from Chicago? If not, what brought you here? Miriam Heard (MH): Since I was three, I lived near Tacoma in Washington State. Then I took a chance on a small art school in the loop, the American Academy of Art, to be exact, and

The evolution of an iSchool startup

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

What happens when information science academics make business their business, turning research projects into commercial enterprises? Is it still research? Is it the job of researchers? “Everyone in our field wants impact, wants their research to matter, but it is not always clear what that means,” says iSchool Associate Professor Jacob Wobbrock. “Do we need to commercialize what we do to have an impact? Is that our burden? Or is it enough to make the discoveries and hope other people will apply them?” To shed light on the campus-to-market process, Wobbrock, iSchool Associate Prof

Why students at the University of Washington want to put their phones away

Friday, April 3, 2015

For almost a decade, David Levy has taught a course at the University of Washington's Information School called "Information and Contemplation." At the beginning of each class, he asks students to pay attention to their breathing. The 20 students in the room can't talk to each other while they do this, and phones and laptops are off limits. But the students aren't complaining. They signed up for this elective class, which starts each session with meditation, and is part of learning to unplug for the course. "For a long time," Levy explained to The Huffington Post, "I've been interested i

Katie Davis awarded $385K grant to advance connected learning in libraries

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

ConnectedLib, a new project by iSchool Assistant Professor Katie Davis, teams faculty members from library and information programs at the University of Washington and University of Maryland with public library partners to build librarians’ capacity to incorporate digital media into their work with youth to promote connections across their learning contexts. The project is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and will support public librarians serving teens and, indirectly, young adult patrons who stand to benefit from librarians’ transformed practices. “I�

iSchool MLIS students selected as ARL Fellows

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Jessica Humphries, first-year MLIS student and Josué Rivera-Olds, a second-year MLIS student were selected by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) for their Career Enhancement Program. Funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and ARL member libraries, the fellowship provides internship experiences in an ARL library to students from traditionally underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups. The goal of the program is to create a diverse research library workforce that will better meet the challenges of changing demographics and the emphasis of global perspecti

PSJB: AnswerDash aims to make your website smarter

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

The iSchool's spinout, AnswerDash, co-founded by faculty members Jacob Wobbrock and Andy Ko, along with University of Waterloo Assistant Professor Parmit Chilana, is profiled in "The Pitch", a regular column by Puget Sound Business Journal Managing Editor Steven Goldsmith.  AnswerDash, which launched its contextual Q&A for websites and web applications product in 2013, offers businesses tools to improve their online customer experience.  "Is the product a game-changer? Buyers want basic questions answered and seller want to close the sale without the risk of losing the

Ivette Bayo Urban: ‘Telling Our Stories’ in Neah Bay

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Since 1997, the Pipeline Project has given UW students the opportunity to tutor and mentor K-12 students in Washington. Through its latest project, UW students gain something in return: a personal understanding of local Native American culture. Six students are currently working on a documentary film project called “Telling Our Stories” with the Native American community in Neah Bay. Through the Pipeline Project, UW students establish connections with fifth-graders in the Neah Bay community and mentor them throughout the year. The students learn about the history and culture of the M

Best Paper Awards for the iSchool at CHI

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

The Association for Computing Machinery’s CHI is the world's premiere conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, presenting a highly selective showcase of the very best advances across the disciplines of computer science, cognitive psychology, design, social science, human factors, artificial intelligence, graphics, visualization, multi-media design and other disciplines. Only the top 1% of the 2150 papers submitted for CHI 2015 achieved a Best Paper designation and the iSchool was represented this year.  Ph.D. student Amanda Menking and Ingrid Erickson (Rutgers University)

What role do MOOCs play in workforce development? New project launched to find out

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Online courses have the potential to expand quality education and career training worldwide, but few people in developing countries access them. Now, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and CourseTalk.com, the largest source of reviews of online courses, are launching a project to investigate and address this unmet potential. The initiative, called Advancing MOOCs for Development, will be driven by research on online course enrollment in Colombia, the Philippines, and South Africa. The iSchool's Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA) will lead this research, wi

iSchool faculty among award finalists for iConference 2015

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

The iConference 2015 organizers announced the finalists for the conference’s best papers and poster competitions. Ph.D. candidate Bryce Newell and Associate Professor Ricardo Gomez are finalists in the "Most Interesting Preliminary Results" category for their paper, "Informal Networks, Phones and Facebook: Information Seeking and Technology Use by Undocumented Migrants at the U.S.-Mexico Border."  Assistant Professor Jaime Snyder and colleagues from Syracuse University are contenders in the "Best Poster" category for their research, "Using Ethnography of Email to Understand Distri