Winter 2022

IMT 589 A: Internet of Things

• Instructor: TBD
• 3 credits; standard grading

IMT 598 B: Blockchain

• Instructor: Jochen Scholl
• 3 credits; standard grading

Blockchain technology has once been labeled a game changer in information management. Since then it has gradually become integral to and important in developing organizations' information management strategies and architecture options. Blockchain is one particular instantiation of the group of so-called Distributed Ledger Technologies (or, DLTs), which provide another unique way in how companies and individuals can share important data. Blockchain/DLT has become known and visible to a broader audience as the underlying technology that enables cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Meanwhile Blockchain and other DLTs have expanded into broader uses and forms of data storing and tracking in areas such as smart contracts, deed and property registries, intellectual property, music, aircraft assemblies, medical records, agriculture and more. This course is non-technical in nature and not designed to cover the technical nuts and bolts of DLTs and Blockchain; however, it provides a general understanding of how DLT/Blockchain works, how its various uses have been evolving, and what its current and future challenges are, all of which also includes regulatory and governance aspects. Understanding Blockchain/DLT and its uses is an asset to and provides career opportunities for information professionals of all designations.

INFO 198 A: Computational & Ethical Literacy In a Social Media Age

• Instructor: Kyle Thayer
• 5 credits; standard grading

We live in a world where social media influence our lives in direct and indirect ways: from snapchat and youtube to twitter bots and cyber-bullying. In order to fully engage in this new reality, you need a level of digital literacy that most college graduates don’t receive. In this course you will learn the fundamentals of programming (we assume no prior experience) and use writing code to explore the ethical issues involving social media design and use.

INFO 498 B:  Indigenous Ways of Knowing in the Digital World

• Instructor: Sandy Littletree
• 4 credits; standard grading

Indigenous people are using a variety of digital tools such as video games, virtual reality, language apps, and digital heritage sites to maintain their relationships to place, language, history, and culture. In this course, we will explore the respectful use and development of these tools with an emphasis on Native North American Indigenous approaches to knowledge. By the end of this course, students will understand how relationality can inform thoughtful, respectful and appropriate uses of information technology that is designed by and for Indigenous people.

INFO 498 C: Games and Information

• Instructor: Marc Schmalz
• 4 credits; standard grading

This course explores games from the perspective of information. As media artefacts, both digital and non-digital games are increasingly utilized not just for entertainment and expression, but also for learning, training, persuasion, data collection, therapy, and community building. This course examines games and information from four perspectives including i) the form and elements of games as designed interactive media artefacts, ii) existing and emerging game functions across multiple domains of human activity, iii) learning and rhetoric in games, and iv) games as information objects. Students will build a solid understanding of the informational aspects of games, the breadth of their use, their potential and limitations, and their place in modern society as an increasingly important media format. In addition to course readings, interactive lectures, and guest speakers, students will engage in a range of in-class gameplay to actively experience concepts.

INFO 498 D: Learning Sciences for Informatics

• Instructor: Caroline Pitt
• 3 credits; standard grading

Over the past year or so, online and hybrid learning have been an essential part of our educational experiences. Additionally, everyone from tech giants to rural school districts to global nonprofits has been discussing, debating, designing, and envisioning the role of technology in learning, in current and future iterations. But, before we get to creating those technologies, we should (and need to) understand the theoretical and practical perspectives on learning and how to combine those theories and concepts into functional lessons, curricula, and, eventually, applications and systems. In this course, we’ll explore the relationship between education and technology, drawing on learning sciences theories and concepts; education history; and current events, research, and experiences. The course will touch on a variety of topics, such as computer-supported collaborative learning, sociotechnical ecosystems, the process of designing technologies for learning, learning analytics, educational games, and learning management tools. Students will have the opportunity to investigate the foundations of specific learning technologies, critique and improve current systems, and propose future designs.

LIS 598 A: Future of Libraries

• Instructor: Chance Hunt
• 3 credits; standard grading
• Online course

Students completing this course will realize a heightened sense of optimism for creating our future libraries. They will have developed a deeper understanding of themselves as leaders and change agents, equipped with the confidence that they can forecast, contribute to and mitigate towards a desired future.

LIS 598 B: Teaching Practicum

• Instructor: Carla Wale
• 3 credits; standard grading

Under the supervision of a faculty member, students in the Master of Library & Information Science Law Librarianship Specialization, who already hold a JD, take primary responsibility for team teaching an online section of Legal Research Methods (for non-JD MLIS students) with other MLIS Law students.

Autumn 2021

IMT 589 A: Information Systems Governance

• Instructor: Jochen Scholl
• 4 credits; standard grading

Governance refers to a set of value systems, rules (including laws and regulations), principles, and core processes, by which an organization governs itself and makes strategic decisions. However, systems of governance may differ between public and private organizations. In either case, a range of stakeholders needs to be actively involved and considered in the governance of organizations. An increasingly important subset of organizational governance are Information governance and Information Technology (IT) governance, both of which need to be integral parts of the overall organizational system of governance. While IT governance and resulting IT strategy generally follow organizational governance and organizational strategy, they also might drive and shape the latter two. Information governance and IT governance, and their match with organizational requirements, can be evaluated along various performance measures. Frameworks of information governance and IT governance help advance good governance and are indispensable for overall organizational success, both in the public and private sectors.

IMT 598 A: Digital Transformations

• Instructor: Fawad Khan
• 3 credits; standard grading

This course is going to introduce the concept of Digital Transformation and Cloud's key emerging technologies and how they are forcing companies to review and formulate a digital strategy which affects the bottom line of any company. We will review the key digital transformation strategy pillars and use Cloud's key emerging technologies, including Cognitive Computing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and IoT to build solutions and applications to help the organizations along this digital journey.

INFO 498 A: Introduction to Cultural Analytics: Data, Computation, and Culture

• Instructor: Melanie Walsh
• 4 credits; standard grading

This course will prepare students to analyze cultural data — such as books, songs, Reddit posts, and film screenplays — with computational methods. After a basic introduction to the programming language Python, we will cover topics including web scraping, data analysis, text mining, and network analysis. We will survey and discuss how these computational tools are applied in humanistic and social scientific research. We will also reflect on the specific problems, challenges, and ethical dilemmas posed by the computational study of culture. This course is designed for students with humanistic and/or social scientific interests who have no previous programming background.

INFO 498 B: Information Security Analysis & Policy

• Instructor: William Li
• 3 credits; standard grading

This course examines ethical, legal policy, and business strategy issues which arise in information security professional practice. Both real-world case study and hands-on exercises are used to explore information security concepts, models, and methods. By the conclusion of the course, through opportunities to work both individually and with their professional peers, students will hone their ability to address the challenges of information security through critical analysis and effective communication.

INSC 598 B: Critical and Ethical Perspectives on Data Algorithms

• Instructor: Anna Lauren Hoffmann
• 4 credits; standard grading

This graduate seminar will ground students in critical social and theoretical concepts for evaluating—and normatively assessing—the data scientific practices and algorithmic processes that pervade our lives. The seminar’s frame is three-fold: biopolitics, power, and forms of administrative violence; historical perspectives on the rise and role of data-based and statistical knowledge in shaping lives and life chances; current perspectives on the role of big data and algorithms in the normative construction of bodies and identities.

LIS 598 A: Computing Cultural Heritage

• Instructor: Ben Lee
• 2 credits; credit/no credit grading
• Online Synchronous 

From large-scale systems for searching the web to the datasets that machine learning practitioners utilize to train their models, our collective cultural heritage is in many ways the substrate of computer science. Indeed, cultural heritage practitioners including humanists, librarians, and archivists have been influential in shaping the discourse surrounding the sociotechnical implications of computing. This course explores various topics within computer science through the lens of cultural heritage: data visualization, human-AI interaction, search & discovery, crowdsourcing, web archiving, design & UX, and classification. The goals of this course are two-fold: first, to survey these topics in computer science, and second, to explore how they manifest within the context of cultural heritage. We will cover one topic every week, with the first meeting devoted to the CS-oriented literature for the topic, and the second meeting devoted to the sociotechnical implications of the topic in practice. During these second meetings, we will speak with cultural heritage practitioners at institutions across the country to learn about the roles of computing in their work, research, and stewardship.  

Spring 2021

IMT 589 A: Cloud Computing

• Instructor: Fawad Khan
• 4 credits; standard grading

This course is going to introduce the concept of Cloud Computing and how it is transforming and evolving the IT industry and the developer ecosystem, as we move away from on-premises to Cloud-based infrastructure and app development scenarios. Discussion of Cloud services models including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. Review of Cloud services usage and migration scenarios considering business goals and objectives along with developing a Costs/Benefits Analysis model. Understand primary business consideration for migrating to cloud services including cost, security, compliance, fault tolerance, backup, disaster recovery and monitoring. Learn about the most popular and consumed services including deploying, managing and maintaining a VM network infrastructure, developing Cloud-based App solutions, Containers, Serverless and Identity & authentication. Discussion of on the horizon key Cloud services in the new digital transformation age including Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and IoT.

IMT 589 C: Two-Way Processing: Bringing American Indian and Alaska Native and Western STEAM Together

• Instructor: Juan Carlos Chavez
• 4 credits; credit/no credit grading
• Note: Offered jointly with LIS 598 G

This course provides an overview of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) Traditional Knowledge in parallel to Western Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math (STEAM) fields. Students will be exposed to traditional AI/AN STEAM concepts through literature and hands-on application within the STEAM fields of astronomy and rocketry. The course will provide exposure to equity in information representation, thinking and creating, and communication. The course will include guests from AI/AN Tribes and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) STEAM professionals and educators. 

IMT 598 A: Blockchain Technologies and Strategies

• Instructor: Frank Coker
• 3 credits; standard grading

Blockchain technology is a game changer and is becoming integral to information management strategies and architecture options. It is going to impact the global economy and change the way companies and individuals share important data. Blockchain began as the underlying technology that enabled cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and is having an even bigger impact in broader forms of data tracking in areas such as contracts, deeds, intellectual property, music, aircraft assemblies, drugs, agriculture and much more. This course provides an understanding how blockchain works and how it is evolving and how it can be an important part of a personal career development. This course is for information professionals whether pursuing a technical systems development track or a career in design and architecture; the goal is to bring technology and users together with systems and technologies that manage and deliver reliable data with certainty and trust.

INFO 498 B: Introduction to Search and Recommender Systems

• Instructor: Chirag Shah
• 4 credits; standard grading
• Tentative course syllabus
• Note: Course counts towards the Data Science and Information Architecture degree options

Search and recommendation systems for organizing and accessing information have become indispensable. It is critical, therefore, to understand their design and operational foundations. In this course students will have an opportunity to learn about search engines, recommendation systems, web crawling, and search interface technologies based on hands-on experience and with a focus on techniques that can be used to access, retrieve, organize, present, and recommend information. Students will work with practical developmental tools and learn relevant concepts through experimentation. For instance, students will employ an open source search engine and learn about indexing, retrieving, and ranking techniques. The course will also introduce some of the latest techniques that various services including e-commerce (Amazon, eBay), social media (Facebook, reddit), and streaming (Netflix, Spotify) use for recommending content and engaging users.

INFO 498 D: The Record of Us All

• Instructor: Joseph Janes
• 3 credits; standard grading

Every day - for that matter, potentially for every minute or second of every day - we interact with a widening variety of information objects, from the trivial to the profound. All of those form part of the human record, the record of who we are as individuals and who we are as a society. That record goes back thousands of years and is our only way of knowing, understanding and remembering days and people gone by, and in turn is the only way we and our world will be known and remembered.

INFO 498 E: Assistive Technology and Inclusive Design

• Instructor: Annuska Zolyomi
• 3 credits; standard grading
• Note: Course counts towards the HCI degree option

Making technology accessible to everyone is a mission of the UW, as demonstrated by the recent formation of the UW Center for Research and Education of Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE). This course introduces the field of assistive technology and inclusive design, drawing from human-computer interaction and disability studies. Students will learn about the lived experiences of people with disabilities, including vision, hearing, mobility, speech, neurodiversity, and cognition. We will survey the landscape of specialized software and hardware that provide innovative ways to access technology, information, and society. We will apply universal design principles to conceptualize novel and ethical accessible technology.

INFO 498 F: Applied Product Design

• Instructor: Brian Fling
• 5 credits; standard grading
• Note: Course counts towards the HCI and Information Architecture degree options

In this hands-on course, you’ll develop and hone your craft by working in a virtual product design studio. You will learn the complete lifecycle of product design – taking ideas from start to finish. This includes ideation, customer research, testing, rapid prototyping, UX and UI design, as well pitching your ideas and receiving design critique.

INSC 598 A: Indigenous Research Methods

• Instructor: Clarita Lefthand-Begay
• 3 credits; credit/no credit grading

Historically research conducted on Indigenous peoples in North America and around the globe was done using biased, dehumanizing and unethical approaches. In the 21^st Century, it is now our responsibility to reject those egregious approaches in order to repair research relationships with Sovereign Tribal Nations and their citizens. When done with respect, reciprocity, relationality and rigor, research outcomes have the potential to inform decision-making and policy among tribal leaders and their counterparts in federal agencies and tribal organizations. In this advanced graduate class, students will engage with foundational reading at the intersection of Indigenous studies, information sciences, environmental and wellbeing. Students will lead class discussions, present published works by prominent scholars, and engage with tribal leaders and citizens to gain a broader understanding about the implications of research within these societies. Lastly, because of the emerging threat from COVID-19 and its toll on tribal communities, students will be encouraged to design a project that will be meaningful to these groups.  

LIS 598 C: Advanced Data Curation

• Instructor: Carole Palmer
• 4 credits; standard grading

This course examines a broad range of practical and conceptual issues in the emerging field of data curation. It focuses on recent advances and challenging problems in the curation of research data across disciplines and new trends in open data resources and services for the general public. The course will draw on research, case studies, and current initiatives to examine key challenges in the field and practical solutions applied by data professionals. In-depth study of topics will be driven by student interests and their contributions to the course through presentations, discussion facilitation, and a final project.

LIS 598 E: Native American Knowledge Systems: Sovereign Rights, Protections and Protocols

• Instructor: Clarita Lefthand-Begay
• 3 credits; standard grading

Who owns, protects and disseminates the knowledge systems and data among tribal communities? For several years, tribal nations in the United States have established internal mechanisms and protocols to protect their traditional knowledge from appropriation, exploitation and misuse. In this course, students will engage multidisciplinary literature to examine the complexities tribes face when protecting their communities, become familiar with efforts of tribal citizens to revitalize their knowledge and demonstrate understanding by synthesizing topics discussed in class. To illustrate these concepts, the course will include case studies, interactive lectures, guest speakers, and in-class discussions.

LIS 598 F: Interrupting Privilege 

• Instructor: Gina Aaftaab
• 3 credits; standard grading

Most discussions of inequality focus on violence, disproportionality, and discrimination. But what about the concept of privilege? How does privilege — in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship status — shore up inequality? This seminar engages questions of privilege through facilitated discussions.

LIS 598 G: Two-Way Processing: Bringing American Indian and Alaska Native and Western STEAM Together

• Instructor: Juan Carlos Chavez
• 4 credits; standard grading
• Note: Offered jointly with IMT 589 C

This course provides an overview of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) Traditional Knowledge in parallel to Western Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math (STEAM) fields. Students will be exposed to traditional AI/AN STEAM concepts through literature and hands-on application within the STEAM fields of astronomy and rocketry. The course will provide exposure to equity in information representation, thinking and creating, and communication. The course will include guests from AI/AN Tribes and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) STEAM professionals and educators.