As a random exercise in memory I offer the following none too certain linkage between the former core curriculum of the MSI program at UMich and certain faculty members.
- 501 = Judy Olson. Contextual design all the way, baby!!
- 502 = Jeff Mackie-Mason. There has to be an economics course.
- 503 = George Furnas. Search and information retrieval to find our way out of the MoRAS.
- 504 = Michael Cohen. The cultural context of information.
The new curriculum.
- 500 = Professor Cohen, holding strong and putting the social systems into information science.
- 501 = Professor Olson. “Contextual Inquiry and Project Management” - the title gives it away.
- 502 = Paul Resnick and Rahul Sami, coming on strong. Let's give some respect up to the network.
I don't have much to complain about on the substance of the new curriculum. It looks like the good stuff is still there. There is still the testy problem of core curriculums in general. Every student has a different background and some parts of the core will duplicate that experience. One of the losers in this whole debate appears to be information economics. I'm sure it will be covered, but it doesn't get it's own course like it had before.
On a meta level I find the whole process of curriculum development to be an interesting trace of the history of disciplines, departments, and individual people. I have no evidence for any of the connections I've made above, they just come to me after two years of observation. (Does this mean that my education taught me something?) What remains behind in the curriculum reflects the people who build it. I suspect that the classes that disappeared didn't have an advocate to speak for them during committee meetings. The great gamble of graduate school is that you don't know the details of the program before you arrive.
Todd, I've been involved in the creation of the SI core since we started in 1996, so I can add a few observations, esp. about the parts I know best.
Generally, info econ in the core: we lost that one about 7-10 years ago. Many professional schools in the US (business, public policy) have a required cor course, full semester, in economics. We tried to have *blend*, in 502, key ideas about human decision making an information; it was never an econ course (alone). George Furnas (psychologist) and I originally designed it; Gary Olson (psychologist) and I created and taught the first version together.
We did enough econ, and with enough rigor (but still at an intro level) to get to topics in information economics (like network externalities).
But we ran into a serious problem of student preparation: the heterogeneous backgrounds of our students meant that we had many from areas in which they had not used any algebra (we *never* used calculus in 502) since high school (which for some returning to school might e 20 years ago), had never done any analytic modeling, had never had a freshman course introducing econ concepts. So we stripped out about half of the formal microeconomic material, and focused on just a few key concepts in decision making (individual choice, choice under uncertainty, strategic choice). Did not get to any info econ topics. Left info econ for those who wanted to specialize later, starting with SI 625. This revision of 502 occurred around 1999-2001.
As for the new core: I am on the curriculum committee and was involved in the new design, so an advocate was there. But as I said, due to heterogeneous student backgrounds, the battle to include more econ as a skill in the core was lost years ago. We will continue to have some of the individual choice and strategic choice theory in SI 500 (which will also have to cover search and retrieval, so we'll be cutting back on both in the core).
As for teachers, by the way, SI 500 will be jointly taught, next year at least, by Prof. Cohen, myself (MacKie-Mason) and Prof. Gary Olson.