iSchool at Syracuse

The Internet and Mental Health

2009-02-12T07:39:00.001-08:00

When psychologist Andrew Campbell began his doctoral studies in 1997, a faculty member strongly urged him to rethink his interest in pursuing how the Internet impacts adolescent health. The Internet is a passing fad, the professor said. It would be dead by 2001.

Needless to say, the faculty member was a little off the mark, and what Campbell began researching has become a booming field of study—cyberpsychology, or the influence of the Internet on human behavior.
Campbell, director of Prometheus and lecturer in psychology at the University of Sydney Faculty of Health Sciences, shared his experiences as a cyberpsychologist during the closing plenary, “The Impact of Information Science and Technology and Mental Health,” at the 2009 iConference.

During his presentation, he touched on how the Internet has become a tool for delivering educational and preventive information to patients, a supportive network for patients to interact with each other, a tool to provide telemedical services to people around the globe, a venue for medical counseling and advising, and a simulated environment that can be used for healing a variety of afflictions, to name a few.

He also described the social and physiological changes occurring in Generation X and Y, including a sharp increase in depression and emotion disorders. “They are highly susceptible to depression and mental illness,” Campbell said. “It had increased four-fold in teen-agers and adolescents in the past decade.”

He stopped short of directly relating their use of technology and online socializing to these increases, but he said it is being studied.

Campbell also said he sees great potential for new uses of social networking and Web 2.0 technologies in therapies and treatments. He presented one such case of a child diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, who used a relaxing virtual world game that responded to the child’s breathing patterns to treat the illness and then could avoid having to take medicines with possible harmful side effects.

Serious games are also being used to conduct preventive medicine trainings, and researchers are trying to find new ways to incorporate more gaming and virtual environments in cyber-medicine. These methods, researchers are discovering, are effective not only for children and teens, but also adults and aging populations.

What can IT do to be green?

2009-02-11T09:19:00.000-08:00

Syracuse Ph.D. student Shuyuan Mary Ho and professional performance systems developer Conrad F. Metcalfe challenged attendees to move toward life-cycle thinking in IT development, use, and implementation.

They outlined three fundamental problems:
· use of fossil fuels growing, but supplies are declining
· environmental degradation—cost to environment for producing toxins
· climate change—human activities are changing the climate

In terms of green IT, they said there were several areas where the field can contribute to solutions. The first was designing from “cradle to cradle” rather than “cradle to grave,” which also could include extending the average two-year life expectancy of laptops, cell phone, and mobile devices.

Other areas where IT can assist in becoming greener is by adapting wireless grid technologies to redirect access energy from one item to another, using software in place of hardware when possible, and creating innovative modeling software to reduce energy waste.

“While there are many factors to consider, the IT community plays a critical role in creating a sustainable, green future,” Ho said.

Developing a Joint EU-US Digital Library Curriculum

2009-02-11T08:55:00.000-08:00

Scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, including panelist Syracuse Professor Jian Qin,
met Wednesday morning to talk about developing a joint European Union-United State digital library curriculum.

The Bologna Project, which was created in Europe and is dedicated to improving graduate education programs internationally, has started taking steps toward building these collaborative partnerships.

For example, in the past language and the variation of meaning in the same academic discipline even prevented joint courses from being taught in European countries. Now, they have changed the framework to focus more on learning outcomes so that people are clear what the objectives are and what skills will be taught, which translates across national borders.

In the United States, however, collaborative digital library courses often occur around common topics and among American Library Association accredited schools.

Also, digital libraries in the United States focus more on the cyberinfrastructure and information management related issues, while Europe is more interested in cultural heritage issues.

The panelists provided an update on the status of the efforts to develop joint EU-US Digital Library Curriculum, and invited others to become active with a group of the 10 American and European universities and institutions to help move this process forward.

Online Teaching Experiences

2009-02-11T07:26:00.000-08:00

Many college students—whether campus based or distance learning—today have taken at least one course online and most are very familiar with online learning environment. A group of faculty and Ph.D. students, led by panelist Syracuse Professor Kevin Crowston, gathered Wednesday morning to discuss how online courses have changed the teaching experience for faculty and learning for students.

The group raised a variety of issues including the impact to content, social interactions, assessment, privacy, plagiarism, and learning styles.

Participants varied in their experiences when it came to campus-based students’ enjoyment and involvement in taking courses online. One school reported that its graduation rates were highest among students who both took campus-based and distance-learning courses.

Online learning works well in skill development courses and in stretching the amount of time for interactions among students and teacher beyond the traditional scheduled “class hours.”

Sharing work in a public online forum also tended to raise the bar for students. “If you know your peers will be checking your work, maybe you’ll try it a little harder,” Crowston said.

Participants that they had to find new ways of assessment as all quizzes and tests had to be “open book,” and most had done away with timed exams, opting instead for final projects that showcased the application of the knowledge acquired over the course of the semester.

Questions were raised about the definition of learning and knowledge. Is it mean being able to apply what you learn or be able to recall the information from memory?

“In the courses I teach, knowledge means being able to use tools,” Crowston said.

The group also discussed tools to detect plagiarism, which is easy to do with so much information available online.

"It's easier today for us to catch plagiarism than it is for students to do it," one participant concluded.

Ph.D posters

2009-02-10T19:00:00.000-08:00

ICTs for Syngery: A Case Study of Scientific Knowledge and Local Farmers' Innovative Activities in Ghana

Benjamin Addom
Winner of the Best Poster Award

Automated Detection of Subject Area for Question Triage in Digital Reference

Keisuke Inoue

Computational Community Interest and Comments Centric Analysis Ranking

Xiaozhung Liu, Vadim Brzeski

Image-Enabled Discourse: A Preliminary Descriptive Investigation

Jaime Snyder

Group Maintenance Behaviors in the Decision-Making Styles of Self-Organizing Distributed Teams

Michael Scialdone (with Qing Li, Kevin Crowston, Robert Heckman)

Exploring Impacts on Older Adults' E-Services Usage

Johanna Birkland

The Value of Public Sector Information As a Strategic Resource to Civil Society Organizations' in South Africa: Evidence from the Fight to Eradicate Poverty

Raed M. Sharif

The Classification of Religion Topics in Wikipedia: Examining an Evolution

David M. Pimental

Interdisciplinary Diversity in the iSchool Community

Andrea Wiggins

The Impact of National Culture on Knowledge Sharing Activities in Global Virtual Collaboration: The Chinese Case

Kangning Wei

Exploring the Use of Ontological Relations in Information Retrieval

Miao Chen

Two Cans on a String: Technical, Social, and Legal Barriers to Effective Information Sharing Among Federal, Tribal, State, and Local Law Enforcement

Joseph Treglia

How Does Web Advertising Affect Users' Information Seeking, Website Evaluation, and Source Evaluation?

Youngseek Kim

The Theory of Trustworthiness Attribution for Countering Insider Threats for Virtual Organizations

Shuyuan Mary Ho

Insider threats and trustworthiness

2009-02-10T12:47:00.000-08:00

Insider threats—security risks posed by people from within an organization—accounted for 37 percent of the $57 million in losses to fraud last year. Employees maliciously stealing information or carelessly handling sensitive information is a serious issue in a variety of industries, government agencies, and other organizations.

Syracuse Ph.D. Shuayan Mary Ho seeks to understand this phenomenon and describe trustworthiness in a way that can be quantified.

Unfortunately, no company is willing to open itself up to share this type of data so Ho created her own environment to study this behavior.

Using student volunteers, she created a game within the Syracuse iSchool learning management system that tested the students’ perceptions of the trustworthiness of their team leader. The leader of each team had an extra 200 imaginary cash (MerryBux), and the game involved whether the leader shared the money or pocketed it.

A mole was planted to influence the teams’ behaviors, including wearing away people’s suspicions of their leader to see if they follow a predictive model. They did.

Leaders who showed an inconsistency between words and behavior received low scores from team members on trustworthiness. Over the course of the five-day scenario, some team members started planning to stage uprisings and oust the team leader.

Ho hopes to expand on this study and apply to other environments.

iSchools responding to man made catastrophes

2009-02-10T12:33:00.000-08:00

What are iSchools doing to help prepare for and respond to man made disasters such as a terrorist attack? That was the topic of a panel Tuesday morning that featured Syracuse iSchool Dean Elizabeth D. Liddy.

The panelists outlined the areas in which they felt iSchools could contribute to dealing with these major catastrophes: modeling scenarios, prediction, mitigation, response, real-time synthesis, and human performance and training.

Pittsburgh iSchool Dean Ron Larsen described a project he worked on for the Department of Defense that sought to detect underground nuclear facilities. His role was to collect what he called second-order information—not using ground penetration radar, but rather tracking heavy equipment shipments or materials delivery. He stressed the iSchool’s holistic approach to problems—combining technical information with social and psychological information.

Liddy focused much of her comments on the role iSchools play in predicting and preventing these catastrophes by analyzing communications, such as e-mails, text messaging, and blogs through natural language processing.

“In these man-made extreme event scenarios, the police, defense, and intelligence communities frequently do have some means to anticipate such events, and thereby make them more predictable and therefore potentially more preventable,” Liddy said.

She talked about how researchers can develop and apply predictable models to this data to weed through the massive amounts of information to find the “needle in the haystack,” or expressions about a planned attack.

Natural language processing has gotten good at mining words with their denotative meanings, and now researchers are focusing on developing automated process to examine the connotative meaning of words and emotive words, Liddy said.

To do this, Liddy said researchers have to find public data from which they can study and build these models and technologies. The data from such cases as Enron are being used, as are data from open source developers who are building archives of e-mail exchanges, papers, and other communications relating to the development of that field.

Other panelists talked about the role psychology and international context can play in these extreme events. Panelists agreed that iSchools are the optimal source of research and solutions in these extreme events because iSchools excel in human-driven technology, information that needs to be processed by both humans and machines, and evaluating the usefulness/effectiveness of technology for humans.

Gaming in iSchools

2009-02-10T11:55:00.000-08:00

The diversity of participants in the gaming discussion Tuesday morning at the iConference paralleled the broad range of research interests related to gaming.

Gaming enthusiasts and researchers representing geographic areas from Croatia to China to State College, Pennsylvania, gathered together to discover what others are doing in advancing gaming as increasingly significant field within iSchools.

Syracuse Professor Scott Nicholson and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Ian MacInnes led the discussion and described their recent research interests as they relate to gaming.

Nicholson heads a $1 million project that is examining the use of gaming in libraries to attract new patrons, mainly teen-agers and adults without children, and create a community hub. He and his research team are creating tools to assess the use of games in libraries and will make those assessment tools available to librarians across the globe through an online form.

Their responses will feed the data pool, which then can be analyzed and returned to game developers and others about the demographics of gamers in libraries.

Nicholson reported how a local Syracuse library instituted 14 new gaming events over the course of a year and how that activity not only attracted teens to the library, but also how those young people formed relationships with senior citizens who also took up gaming at the library.

MacInnes said his interest in gaming stemmed from the monetization of virtual worlds and the business model that was developing for companies to participate in these new spaces. One such idea was the development of paid advertising within virtual worlds—avatars drinking Coca-Cola or wearing Ralph Lauren, for example.

Others, such Ph.D. student Joey Lee from Penn State were interested in designing games for education use. One of his projects involved creating a game that would educate people about Asian American identities and fighting stereotypes.

Another researcher created serious games about health issues, such as getting college bound students to get their shots by showing a dorm filled with creepy crawlers ready to infect them. The idea, she said, was to ridicule the gamers who had not gotten their shots and creating peer pressure to do so.

The group also brainstormed ways in which the iSchools could bring something unique to gaming that other disciplines might not be able to do. Ideas ranged from educational uses to collaborative design to influencing game development and other areas that bring together multiple disciplines and perspectives.

Are blogs and social networking sites fair game for researchers?

2009-02-10T11:28:00.000-08:00

For researchers, virtual environments and social networking sites are full of rich data that can be used in a number of ways—to better understand how communities/groups develop, how technology is being adopted to reach a variety of goals, and a host of other interdisciplinary research topics.

But what are the issues of ethics, privacy, and ownership that arise in harvesting this data?

People post information about themselves to sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, SecondLife, Twitter, and blogs—public sites with limited restrictions on access. So if people are willing to publish this information openly, can’t researchers use it?

It depends, according to participants involved in a session on online survey-based data collection led by Syracuse Associate Dean Jeff Stanton and Ph.D. student Aggie Kwiatkowska.

Several regulations, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and institutional review board (IRB) guidelines, limits the use of data—particularly qualitative information—that can be traced back to a specific individual.

Some researchers said they try to develop their own online communities with volunteers who are willing to participate, but the work and resources that go into building the community takes away from the research they hope to conduct in this space. It’s also a controlled environment as opposed to the more natural environments such as Facebook.

Another researcher raised the issue of why blogs can’t be quoted like any other published article or book, and another wondered if student work that is posted on a public space such as blog or web site can be used in research or if that violates IRB or FERPA rules.

Panelists said these questions are currently being answered on a case-by-case basis, and that there is no black and white when it comes to these emerging social networking spaces.

Can Internet access reduce corruption worldwide?

2009-02-10T11:02:00.000-08:00

Syracuse Professor Martha Garcia-Murillo wants to know if access and use of the Internet can reduce corruption globally. She presented preliminary findings of data collected from 180 countries that clearly identified political and economic factors, which directly correlated to corruption.

The more politically unstable a country, the more incidents of corruption there are, she said. As a country’s wealth increases, corruption decreases. As press within a country becomes more empowered and free, the incidents of corruption within that country decrease.

But when it came to Internet use, the results weren’t as clear. The results were all over the map. But why?

Garcia-Murillo suggested that in developing countries, the Internet is not considered a credible source. Many of these countries also have low rates of Internet use. Also, people are being overwhelmed with information, including information from governments. This information overload can distract people from noticing what information is missing or from finding the information that might show incongruities.

Illegal downloading among college students study

2009-02-10T08:57:00.000-08:00

College students today are savvy and know how to find what they want online including copyrighted music, music, and software downloads. But just how pervasive is this problem and how are accessing these file?

Syracuse iSchool Associate Dean for Research Jeff Stanton and Ph.D. student Isabelle Fagnot led a study at Syracuse University to find out. They interviewed a small sample of nine undergraduates to do some preliminary information gathering, and then conducted a larger anonymous paper survey of 164 students, and an even larger web-based survey of 404 students.

They asked students a series of questions hoping to determine whether they were downloading copyrighted material, uploading this material, or sharing files only with friends on an individual basis.

They discovered that about 3/4 of students were participating in peer-to-peer downloading, about ½ were downloading software, 1/3 were sharing with friends, and about 13 percent were uploading copyrighted content for others to download.

One of the most interesting findings of his study was that students who were most aware of the illegal nature of downloading copyrighted materials were also the most likely to engage in the behavior. Also, the better educated a student that he was in information security, the more likely he was to share files with his peers.

Stanton also asked students to suggest ways that the university can help prevent students from doing this, and passed that information along to university.

Attendees at the iConference also suggested ways that universities can prevent this, including following the library model, of licensing music that students could access.

Little eScience, Big eScience

2009-02-09T13:27:00.000-08:00

eScience goes by many names, including cyberinfrastructure, but its basic meaning is the same: It is the use of information and communications technology (ICT) to support scientific work. ICTs enable research progress by providing access to data, resources, and people. Science is changing and becoming more reliant on digital resources.

Many people are familiar with “big eScience”—these are large, well-funded projects with many researchers that are all working toward the same goal, such as the human genome project to map and identify human genes or the physicists who work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.

“Big eScience” researchers share data with each other, use the same tools, and are consistent in building repositories of their work. They get large, sometimes international grants to support their work.

Little eScience, on the other hand, involves perhaps only a couple researchers—a professor and a graduate assistant, and explore issues and new theories. The ICT issues for “Little eScience” researchers are different. These people generally are more protective of their data, and the tools and metadata they use vary from researcher to researcher.

Syracuse professors Steve Sawyer and Kevin Crowston and Ph.D. student Andrea Wiggins examined the differences between little and big eScience access to data, resources, and people, and suggested ways in which little eScience researchers could take steps to build their digital support systems.

For example, Wiggins suggested little eScientists create metadata standards, use analysis workflows, and build preprint repositories of their research. But she also said that there needs to be incentives and input of funding and human resources for these changes to occur.

The Pros and Cons of Automating the Tracking of Suspicious Behavior Online

2009-02-09T12:37:00.000-08:00

Technology can be used to help track and catch criminals, ranging from terrorists and organized criminals to those who commit credit card fraud. But a national platform would be a more comprehensive solution to flagging suspicious behavior and preventing crimes as well as apprehending criminals.

Similar technology is currently being used to track Internet-users behavior online—what sites they visit, what they purchase, what they search for, and sometimes even where they’re located when using the Internet. But what is the feasibility of developing a national platform to flag suspicious behavior? What would be the social implications of such a technological solution?

Moderating by Syracuse doctoral students Joe Treglia and Shuyuan Mary Ho, a panel of intelligence, fraud detection, and academic experts discussed this notion of a national behavioral anomaly detection platform.

Treglia and Ho explained that the platform would provide a “statistical firewall” by creating a system of automated analysis of data indicating incidents of malicious behavior, patterns, or activities across a wide variety of industries. The system would employ spider technologies and data mining to pull relevant information from such sources as banks, telephone companies, airlines, and Internet service providers.

Much of the discussion focused on the public perception of such a tool and the threat it posed to individual privacy. Although some retailers currently track people’s behaviors online to better target their marketing without too much resistance from the public, participant doubted the public would be as permissive with law enforcement agencies collecting similar information.

For the information to be useful to a law enforcement agency, the data has to be tracked to a specific individual. The public would have to be aware and approve of such tracking, and even then, some question the ethics of doing so.

“I told my children that I would read their text logs, so they knew I’d be checking up on them,” Treglia said. “But I think halfway through the day, they forget about that. I think the same thing could happen here.”

Medical Informatics in iSchools

2009-02-09T08:06:00.000-08:00

For children who have chronic diseases, the transition to adulthood brings a range of information management issues. Until this point, the parents have considered themselves the owner of their child’s complete medical history—pulling together all of their personal observations as well as the treatments by numerous doctors and specialists over the span of their child’s life.

Transferring medical history information from pediatricians to adult-care physicians as well as from the parents to the patient presents medical informatics challenges. This example, presented by Syracuse Professor Carsten Osterlund, is one of many discussed in a roundtable discussion, iSchool Health and Medical Research Initiatives and Opportunities, on February 9.

With U.S. President Barack Obama pledging to fund projects in medical informatics and transferring paper records into electronic medical records, iSchool faculty and students were interested in sharing information and building relationships to support their research in this area.

Genetics, patient perception, collaborative information behavior in health care teams, aging, emergency medical management, community health information, pharmaceutical connections, accessibility and access technology, and social networking and gaming in medicine were all topics of interest to those in attendance.

Professor Ellen Detlefsen of the University of Pittsburgh outlined what she considered to be “success factors” in building medical informatics research projects, including:
· One or more full-time faculty members focused on health information
· A medical or health science faculty nearby, preferably within a medical school
· Access to large academic health sciences library
· Other medical informatics research underway within the same university
· Personal, professional, and electronic links among the previous four factors

Associate Dean of Rutger’s iSchool Hartmut Mokros and Professor Madhu Reddy of Penn State said one of the challenges is understanding the language used in health information and finding the parallels to your research interests. Each discipline or field of medicine has its own language, so Mokros suggested focusing on the problem to find collaborations, rather than the discipline.

“I noticed there’s a lot of interest at the dean’s level and maybe a few Ph.D. students,” Osterlund said. “I bet there’s a lot of faculty here that didn’t come because they don’t see themselves in ‘medical informatics.’”

Faculty avoid labeling themselves, so the field within the iSchool needs to define itself as something broader than medicine, presenters said. These medical informatics projects pull together security, sociotechnology, information retrieval, information architecture, and information management, among many others of interest to iSchool faculty members.

Osterlund suggested that the iSchools create some form of formal connection around this topic—whether that is themed around funding proposals, or social networking on Facebook or elsewhere. It was then suggested to include medical informatics programs that are not located within iSchools, or making joint appointments with these individuals to iSchool faculties.

UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp examines the way universities select faculty

2009-02-09T06:38:00.000-08:00

University of North Carolina Chancellor Holden Thorp (blog at http://holden.unc.edu) delivered the opening keynote at the 2009 iConference and challenged universities to rethink the way they hire faculty and to support goals that will make graduates successful in the global 21st century.

Thorp suggests that leadership, entrepreneurial thinking, and an institutional mindset are three key ingredients that makeup the 21st century knowledge worker.

He outlined his definition of leadership to include:

being able to articulate the problem you’re interested in studying or the field you’ll be leading, why it’s worthwhile, and why it’s challenging

getting resources to succeed

being able to help people in and out of organization

keeping your head in crisis

Then we went on to explain what he means by "entrepreneurial thinking." This doesn't necessarily mean creating new businesses, rather Thorp says it means being more committed to an idea than the process, looking for the next problem to solve, breaking through academic silos, and taking advantage of opportunities to pursue an idea.

Thorp said another necessary trait of a 21st century knowledge worker involves the ability to create an institutional mindset. To do this, one must put the common good in front of protecting personal interests, have a diverse decision-making teams, and promote people based on their ability to work "between the silos" or between divisions in the organization.

In the current economy of tightening state budgets and with venture capitalists retracting from new projects, Thorp said he sees a silver lining. Universities, particularly their graduate programs, are seeing increases in the application pools and the millennial generation filling classrooms are more committed to creativity and public service. President Obama has promised new funding for science, health care, energy, and higher education.

"I'm extremely optimistic about what our students will do when they graduate."

He concluded by questioning the current criteria most universities use to select its faculty members, and suggested that they need to value other characteristics, including teamwork, crisis management, perserverance, people skills, institutional mindset, and compassion.

Following his presentation, he answered questions ranging from how to promote interdisciplinary work to discussing the value of liberals arts education versus job preparation programs.

Most great leaders--from UNC and others--are mostly liberal arts majors, Thorp said. Liberal arts education is American, and some would argue it is the reason why the country is most of the most innovative in the world, he said.

Syracuse iSchool faculty and students are well represented at the 2009 iConference

2009-02-02T14:58:00.000-08:00

Syracuse University School of Information Studies faculty and students will share their expertise at the fourth annual iConference at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, February 8 through 11. This year’s iConference theme is iSociety: research, education, engagement.

Syracuse University iSchool members will be presenting on a range of topics in 15 sessions throughout the conference. Their papers and presentations will explore such subjects as gaming, privacy and trust, intellectual property, international information issues, green IT, and national security, among other areas.

Thirteen Syracuse iSchool doctoral students will be among the 77 selected to present posters this year. The posters showcase the students’ groundbreaking research on a variety of issues, including national culture and knowledge sharing, older adults and e-literacy, web advertising and impact on information seeking, online collaboration and group dynamics, search engine technologies, information sharing among law enforcement agencies, and information access and government.

The 2009 iConference opens with a Doctoral Colloquium that brings together Ph.D. students from of iSchool-related disciplines and iSchool faculty to gather feedback and generate discussions about their current research projects or thesis work. At the same time, the conference is sponsoring a Junior Faculty Mentoring Session for tenure-track faculty to meet with senior iSchool faculty, including Syracuse’s Martha Garcia-Murillo and Ping Zhang, and have informal dialogue about emerging intellectual communities within the information field.

The following day, participants will hear from Jose-Marie Griffiths, dean of the School of Information and Library Science at UNC, and UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp, who will deliver the opening plenary presentation. The closing plenary presentation features Edward Seidel, director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure and Floating Point Systems Professor in Louisiana State University’s Department of Physics.

At the conclusion of the conference, Syracuse Professor Steve Sawyer and his co-organizers will lead a four-hour workshop on “The Science of Socio-Technical Systems in iSchools.” The workshop hopes to explore and begin to frame a future research agenda based on socio-technical research in the information field.

The 2009 iConference is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and organized by the iCaucus, a group of information schools from the United States and Canada dedicated to exploring the relationship of information, technology, and people, and to advancing the understanding of the role of information in human endeavors. For more information, visit http://www.ischools.org/iconferences/2009index/.

Xbox: Gaming and Communities

2008-03-01T09:06:00.000-08:00

In 2001, Microsoft launched Xbox Live, and gamers around the globe began building their own online community. By 2004, there were more than 2,000 members, mostly males. Or so we thought.

Christa Phillips (aka TriXie), community editor at Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox.com and author of the weekly "Community Confidential" column and TriXieblog.com, said women have always been there. Maybe in small numbers, and usually very discreet, sometimes adopting gender neutral names or masculine names, but there nonetheless.

As the number of members grew, female gamers started banding together, creating mini sororities online. Unfortunately, they also started getting catty and elitist with each other. Phillips saw this downward trend, and stepped in to change the culture for female gamers. She and two other female gamers formed gamerchiX--an open and supportive online community for female gamers. They created a gamerchiX "manifesta" that outlined a code of conduct to ensure a welcoming and safe environment for all female gamers.

Phillips, who called herself the "cruise director" of Xbox live, spends much of her time working on building communities of gamers, tending to their needs, and resolving problems between gamers or small communities of gamers. In the process, she's identified some unique characteristics between female and male gamers.

Some of those differences include:
--Women tend to gravitate toward more collaborative, team-based games.
--Women tend to be more supportive to new gamers and teach these gamers the ropes by walking them through various games
--Women use a variety of consoles (Xbox 360, PlayStation3, Wii, etc.) and accept gamers from other console traditions

Phillips is hoping to encourage the number and involvement in female gamers in the Xbox environment. She currently has 4,500 gamerchiX members who range in age from 4 to 85. She alluded to studies that show gamers are more likely to stay interested in math and science, and so she hopes the young female gamers will remain interested in science, technology, and math and feel empowered to become game developers or other professionals in the gaming industry. Females only make up 12 percent of the gaming industry, as Phillips can attest to as she's often the only female in the room at work.

Phillips also tries to recruit new members and retain current gamers through a variety of special online events such as Family Game Night, gamerchiX Ladies' Night, Xbox All Nighter, Game with Fame, and Game with Developer.

"These get great response from gamers," she said. "Being able to play and possibly beat the game developer is like winning an Oscar for these people."

Collaboration in iSchools

2008-02-29T22:56:00.000-08:00

From the moment a baby is born, it said that he recognizes his father's voice. "The fundamental human condition is to experience and collaborate," Professor Mike Nilan said. "Human beings help each other address uncertainty."

Nilan and Professor Michael D'Eredita suggested in their presentation on Friday at the 2008 iConference that iSchools are unique as field because they can drive technology development to help people solve problems. They examined how the Internet changed the way people communicate and work together, and how iSchool researchers can realize the Internet and all the related technologies' full potential.

"We're a fragmented field--information systems, library science, telecommunications, computer science, social sciences, and many others," he said. "What brings us all together? What are our researchers interested in?"

Nilan said one of the challenges for iSchools is that they need to collaborate more effectively with each other in order to understand collaborating as a human response to a changing environment.

"This is the source of our utility as a field," Nilan said, "the extent to which we can help other people collaborate."

Trends in Faculty Hiring at iSchools

2008-02-29T22:52:00.000-08:00

In the 1980s, 20 library schools closed their doors due to a variety of reasons--loss of accreditation, waning enrollment, and the emergence of a broader field of information science. Those who didn't evolve, closed their doors. Today, more than half of the schools who call themselves iSchools have roots as library schools, accordin to doctoral student Andrea Wiggins, who presented during the opening day of the 2008 iConference on faculty hiring in iSchools and the broader implications of those hires on the iField.

She pointed out one of the most striking features about iSchool faculty is the diversity of academic training they have. For instance, faculty members from the 19 iSchools who are members of the iCaucus represent 172 unique areas of study. She combined similar areas to reach a total of 13 categories of study, ranging from computer science and library science to psychology and political science.

Based on U.S. News Rankings of other academic fields, such as computer science and engineering, the highest ranked schools have the least diversity in faculty degrees. However, the opposite appears to be true for iSchools. "Diversity accrues rewards in their reputation," she said.

Wiggins ended her presentation by asking what iSchools could lose if they try to define themselves too narrowly or if they establish a common identity, like what the iCaucus is setting out to do. Will iSchools end up hiring only graduates of iSchools on their faculty? How will that affect the nature of iSchools?

"Diversity in faculty pedigree may be part of the 'special sauce' of an iSchool," she said.

Information Credibility

2008-02-29T14:21:00.000-08:00

Is wikipedia as credible as Encyclopedia Britannica? What factors do people consider when determining whether a web site or other information source is credible? Professor Scott Nicholson helped to lead a discussion of these and other issues of the credibility of information.

"Google thinks that popularity and credibility are the same," Nicholson said. "In some disciplines, they may be. In others, not." Should we trust the wisdom of the crowd? Will the best information bubble up?

Most agreed that credibility is a very subjective experience, and design often plays a role. If a web site is designed well, people generally trust it more. Also, one theory also suggests that trust is developed when the information seems plausible and fits with an individual's value system.

They are also asking whether user-generated comments on such sites as Amazon.com helpful in assessing credibility or is it just an extra layer of work for the users. The participants discussed identifying classes of users on the scale of credibility. On a medical information site, for example, a doctor's postings on treatment would have more credibility than a lay person; but a patient may be more reliable in describing the effects of chemotherapy.

The group offered several questions that present interesting areas for further research and exploration. Some of those include:

How does language and translations affect credibility?
Is there a way to measure credibility?
Can iSchool researchers create a metric to determine the credibility?
What's the relationship between credibility versus believability; credibility versus validity; credibility and convenience; and credibility and trust or skepticism?

Medical Informatics

2008-02-29T13:42:00.000-08:00

Professor Carsten Osterlund and doctoral student Saira Naim Haque led a conversation to explore the state of medical informatics in iSchools. Carsten and Haque and others who participated in the session investigate such areas as:

--integrate information systems to ensure cohesive and comprehensive patient care

--errors as an information issue, not a medical issue

--medical versus health informatics

--re-engineering process to alleviate overcrowing issues in ERs (as opposed to building larger hospitals or hiring more doctors)

--patient online support groups and how they can employ new technologies such as wikis

--use of information communication and technologies to improve healthcare in third world countries

--privacy and patients' rights

The group also discussed why iSchools are the appropriate place for this type of research and what unique skills they bring to medical informatics research. A few qualities that stood out were the interdisciplinary nature of iSchools and an outsider's perspective that can build theories from the applied nature of this research.

Researchers from iSchools are removed from the clinical aspects of the field, and yet they are focused on the information needs of both patients and doctors. They can help bridge the MD world and the Ph.D. world by focusing on the social implications of technology.

Several iSchools are launching medical informatics courses or programs within the school or partnering with other programs within their universities. What should those courses and programs look like? Participants suggested that courses should be based in applied work.

Whose Turn Is It? Research on Gaming in the iSchools

2008-02-29T11:44:00.000-08:00

Professors Scott Nicholson and Ian MacInnes discussed the role of gaming in teaching skills and content in information schools, and also what role information schools can have in the theory and development of games more generally.

"We got trapped in a bad model of educational game where you roll a die and move a piece and answer a question and 'oh look, we're learning,'" Nicholson said. He'd like to see how new games and their design can expand the possibilities of learning and enjoyment for participants.

He discussed a game he expects to release in October called Tulipmania that teaches students about the bubble stock market. Gamers get to play the wily investors who are all trying to get wealthy when a virus begins wiping out the tulip population. He emphasized the role of games in motivating people to learn.

Marisa Cohn from UC-Irvine pointed out that a rewards system is often part of the motivation equation as well. She said she wouldn't play Free Rice to increase her vocabulary, but rather she plays because the site gives free rice to hungry people based on the number of people playing the word game.

Nicholson flipped that idea to say that many games also "punish" or penalize players who don't follow the game's intended rules. For example, in some virtual military games, if you shoot a friendly soldier because it would be fun, you are penalized.

The workshop participants also discussed the need to look at the interplay between designers and users in gaming. How does that affect a teacher-student relationship, for example? Would teachers play along with their students in the learning game, or are they monitoring or assisting the play of the students?

What's the role of theory in the development and use of games in various settings? Should games be in libraries? Nicholson and MacInnes are currently doing research in gaming to uncover the answers to some of these questions.

Information: The Power to Transform Our World

2008-02-29T10:02:00.000-08:00

A group of communications professionals from iSchools across the country led a session Friday morning for faculty and doctoral students at the iConference 2008 and provided sevearl tips on how to improve their presentational, writing, and media relations skills. Here's a quick summary of their presentation.

Charlie DuBois, communications manager at the iSchool at Penn State, discussed iSchools' identity development--the merging of several disciplines computer science, library science, information, telecommunications, and many others in the common study of the intersection of people, information, and technology--and the iCaucus communications plan.

He pointed to the iCaucus web site--ischools.org--as a resource for all people to learn who we are and what we do. He presented the iCaucus' new logo, which all 19 member schools have begun adopting and using on their web sites and in their recruitment/promotional materials. We are building a common nomenclature--iPro and iField. "It's time we get ourselves on people's mental maps," he said.

Ron Dietal from UCLA's National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) offered some presentation tips on the design, delivery, and environment of content.

Design Tips

Tip 1--Don't overwhelm listeners with too much information, especially in a visual format. Focus your content.

Tip 2--Charts and graphs don't necessarily help audience members. Keep them simple. Audience members don't listen well when they're reading or studying a complex slide.

Tip 3--Follow the 666 rule. 6 bullets with 6 or fewer words per bullet, 6 or fewer information points in a graphic.

Delivery Tips

Tip 1--Practice makes perfect.
Tip 2--Learn from effective presenters.
Tip 3--Use eye contact and gestures.
Tip 4--Keep track of time.
Tip 5--Hold the handouts until the end.

Environment Tips

Tip 1--Arrive early to check sound, lighting, technology, furniture layout and temperature.

Kelly Shaffer, director for external relations at the iSchool at University of Pittsburgh, offered guidelines for academic professionals in their presentations and writing.

Writing Tips for Academics

1. Carefully define your question/argument. What is it and why is it important? Then develop thesis statement.
2. Consider your audience, and assess the knowledge level of audience. Journal, conference, grant, student, media. Then use the correct tone and language.
3. Draft an outline and write to it. Know or write your ending first.
4. Proofread your work 24 hours later and/or find someone else to do it.

Marlo Welshons, an assistant dean at the iSchool at University of Illinois, provided general guidelines for handling media relations and responding to media inquiries.

Media Relations Tips

1. Identify your areas of expertise--not necessarily your research interests.
2. Give your communications person a heads up early on research grants or results, upcoming event, or news story.
3. Identify specialized publications in your field. NYTimes will only pick up very few stories. Suggest where the story can be pitched.
4. Justify the newsworthiness of your story. Why should we care or a reporter want to write about it? How is it unusual? Who will benefit and how?
5. Respond promptly to media requests. Ask about their deadlines.
--type of story
--context in which you might be quoted
--reporter's and publication's background
6. Write out your answers/points in advance. You can help direct the interview in this way. Email questions in advance.
7. Assume everything you say will be quoted. Avoid saying "no comment"--don't speak beyond your expertise, but do offer other sources with info for the reporter.
8. Use plain language and use metaphors when helpful.
9. Let your communications person know who interviewed and when the story is scheduled to run.

Information Assurance and Security

2008-02-29T09:29:00.000-08:00

Doctoral students Isabelle Fagnot and Shuyuan Mary Ho shared their perspectives on information security issues and challenges on a panel Friday morning that explored possible areas for future iSchool research.

Ho discussed the use of confidentiality and use of language to protect security. She also suggested the possibility in which researchers create an environment to lure hackers into an information "honeypot" and then track their behaviors in this environment. By gathering this data, researchers might be able to better predict hackers' modes of attacks. With this knowledge, researchers could then develop more secure systems.

Professor Kevin DeSouza from the University of Washington's iSchool said there are lots of opportunities for iSchools to research in information security and assurance. "We have an edge to do more than other professional fields in explanatory and predictive models," he said.

Use of Games in Virtual Worlds for Online Education

2008-02-29T09:08:00.000-08:00

Professor Martha Garcia-Murillo likes teaching lessons through hands-on projects and group work. But in teaching courses online in an asynchronous learning environmeng, she found it difficult to have a rich interaction with her students in this way. So she ventured into the virtual world and gaming.

In her information policy class, she created a game in the children's virtual world of Habbo Hotel. She assigned a certain role to each student, ranging from a state governor and a university chancellor to a director at AT&T and a marketing professional. Each had to develop their position on a given piece of legislation such as the Spy Act and then argue and negotiate their position in order to pass the legislation.

Through this exercise, she discovered that the virtual world allowed students to learn in a variety of styles and approach the subject matter in a more pleasing manner to them. This forum also encouraged to be risk-takers in a safe environment. Students commented that they were more aggressive in their defense of their position and were less intimidated by their peers in the virtual world.

They also liked the challenge of having to "learn on their feet" in this fast-paced virtual world.

Based on her initial results, Garcia-Murillo said this seemed to be an effective way to increase interaction of online students while still getting the course content across. One downside, however, was the time and energy it took her to develop the game and policymaking scenario, the space, and the instructions for students.

Arts in iSchool Education

2008-02-28T16:55:00.000-08:00

How can iSchools incorporate studio-based learning to improve the education offered to their students? Is there a way to incorporate the creative process into information science curricula? How can we balance scientific and artistic knowing?

These are the questions Professor Robert Heckman and doctoral student Jaime Snyder explored in a discussion of their academic paper with a crowd of iSchool faculty and students at the iConference 2008.

Fine arts offer ambiguous content that allows people to comment and build their communications skills, said Snyder, who earned a fine arts degree in painting. She outlined a four-step process used in an art studio that they intend to incorporate in such classes as IST 444 Information Reporting and Presentation. This process includes:

production

performance

interpretation

critique

This process challenges students to fully defend their opinions and their work. Several other iSchools are interested in this proposal and are also exploring how they can incorporate a similar fine arts-based learning enviornment in their programs.

Dean Elizabeth D. Liddy's Keynote Address

2008-02-28T14:08:00.000-08:00

Today, the biggest challenge to people is not finding access to information, but rather it is filtering an ever-increasing abundance of information. "We're facing a serious problem of too much information," Elzabeth D. Liddy, dean of the iSchool at Syracuse, said in her keynote address February 28 at the iConference 2008 on the UCLA campus. "In this world, it takes too much time and attention to find the right information." Liddy described how her research in natural language processing at Syracuse University is helping to make search engines and similar technologies smarter.

The most common nouns in the English language each have approximately seven different meanings, and a verb typically has 11 possible senses. How then can a search engine know which meaning of the word we're seeking to find? How do we find an unbiased way to tag or filter information to yield better search results?

Liddy and her fellow researchers at Syracuse are investigating multiple ways to answers those questions by improving access to, and the retrieval of, information. Some of these include:

Question answering

Information extraction

Text mining

Summarization

Automatic metadata generation

Content analysis in the humanities and social sciences

Liddy has led several projects in each of these areas, and is using levels of linguistical analysis to create systems with human-like understanding. Her approach to examining languages ranges from morphological, lexical, and syntactical to semantics, discourse, and pragmatic. She is trying to identify the ways in which our use of language reveals the emotive meanings--whether the text is favorable or unfavorable about a given subject.

Challenges for the future of natural language processing include understanding how social and cultural contexts effect language and word meaning, and how to "read between the lines" and discerning connotative meanings.

iConference 2008 --Day One

2008-02-28T07:12:00.000-08:00

Last night, there was pre-conference doctoral colloquium for outstanding Ph.D. students who participated in workshops with faculty from iSchools across the country on the UCLA campus.

Of the 30 doctoral students selected to present posters today, 10 are from the iSchool at Syracuse. Here's a quick overview of their presentations:

“Community Innovativeness”: A New Perspective on Knowledge Creation
Benjamin Addom

Syracuse University; bkaddom@syr.edu
Topics: Community techologies and networking, Information technology and services for under-addressed communities
Keywords: Community Informatics, Innovation, Knowledge Generation

Older Adults and Information Technology: The Current State of Research and Future Directions
Johanna L. H. Birkland and Michelle L. Kaarst-Brown
Syracuse University; jlbirkla@syr.edu
Topics: Information technology and services for under-addressed communities
Other Keywords: older adults, seniors, elderly, information technology

Towards a Data and Workflow Collaboratory for Research on Free and Open Source Software and its Development
James Howison, Kevin Crowston, and Megan Conklin
Syracuse University; Elon University; jhowison@syr.edu
Topics: Information infrastructure development, Preserving digital information
Keywords: cyberinfrastructure, repositories

Towards a Model of Determinants of Web Services Platform Adoption by Complementers
Joseph B. Rubleske
Syracuse University; jrublesk@gmail.com
Topics: Information infrastructure development
Keywords: software platforms, web services, adoption, network effects, complementarities

Stability and Change in Self-organizing Technology-supported Groups: Evidence from Genres of Communication in Free and Open Source Software Development
James Howison
Syracuse University; jhowison@syr.edu
Topics: Community techologies and networking
Other Keywords: genres of online communications, distributed teams, organizational change

Deriving Ontology from Folksonomy and Controlled Vocabulary
Miao Chen and Jian Qin
Syracuse University; mchen14@syr.edu
Topics: information organization
Keywords: Ontology, folksonomy, tag, controlled vocabulary, vector space

Proposal of Document Classification with Word Sense Disambiguation
Xiaozhong Liu
Syracuse University; xliu12@syr.edu
Topics: information organization
Other Keywords: Document classification, WSD, NLP

Group Maintenance Behaviors in Self-organizing Distributed Teams
Na Li, Michael John Scialdone, Robert Heckman, and Kevin Crowston
Syracuse University; nli@syr.edu
Topics: Community techologies and networking
Keywords: Group maintenance, self-organizing distributed team, FLOSS, politeness theory, content analysis

Conversation Repository for Participatory Librarianship
Keisuke Inoue
Syracuse University; kinoue@syr.edu
Topics: Community techologies and networking, information organization
Keywords: information seeking behavior, information retrieval, Web 2.0, discourse analysis, conversation theory

Behavorial Parameters of Trustworthiness for Countering Insider Threats
Shuyuan Mary Ho
Syracuse University; smho@syr.edu
Topics: Information assurance and security
Keywords: trustworthiness, insider threats, personnel anomaly detection