Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

IS 270: Introduction to Information Technology

Winter 2005

Course homepage: http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/blanchette/IS270/

Instructor: Jean-Franois Blanchette

Office hours: GSEIS 218, Tuesdays 3-5pm

Email: blanchette@gseis.ucla.edu

Reader: Kevin Lane

Office hours: GSEIS 219, Wednesdays, 1-3pm

Email: kklane@ucla.edu

Approach and objectives

This course is designed to teach the fundamental concepts of information technology in ways relevant to professional practice in the library, archival, and informatics fields. It is not about programming or application-specific skills, and the course will not involve any laboratory work. It is also not primarily about the inner workings of the computer considered in isolation. Rather, the course will focus on teaching students fundamental concepts of computing that can be used in the analysis of networked applications, concepts such as applications, architecture, modularity, performance, service, and protocol.

Such concepts will be continually accessed by students in their professional life, as they create strategic technology plans, evaluate and acquire applications for their organization, contribute to information policy discussions, participate with engineers in design discussions about networked applications, seek to understand business and social opportunities created by networked information technologies and attempt to communicate this understanding to others working from different expertise and professions.

Because of the rapid pace of evolution of information technologies, it is important to find ways in which you can keep your skills fresh. This course will help you to identify, access and use resources for keeping up-to-date with the field of information technology, as relevant to your particular field of expertise, e.g., trade press, research journals and conferences, field experiences, etc.

The course presupposes that students have completed ÒIS260: Information StructuresÓ and are interested in learning how to improve their understanding of information technologies as they will impact their professional practice.

Method

The final product of this course will be the writing of a term paper, in the 20 pages range. The paper will be in the genre of a business intelligence report, that is, a report covering all essentials aspects of a certain information technology (or part of), directed at a manager seeking to make an informed decision about acquiring the technology for their organization. The report will follow a fixed structure, covering the technology from several angles explored in the class, including technical, industrial, policy, standardization, market, and research.

Examples of potential point of departures for finding a topic for the report include:

Wearable computing
Digital rights management
Online education technologies
Electronic repositories for scholarly publishing
Course management software
Storage of authentic electronic records
Use of networked technologies for Òcitizen scienceÓ
Intelligence informatics
Intelligent Transportation Systems
PDF/A
Electronic delivery of government services

Students should verify their chosen topic with the instructor or the course reader in order to confirm that it has the required breadth and depth.

Each week, you will be asked to apply the concepts covered in a class to the topic you have chosen for your report, in the form of a one to two pages document. In this way, by the end of the semester, you will have already gathered much of the material relevant to your report. As well, classes will usually begin with short, randomly chosen, student discussion of their write-up, as it applies to their topic.

Write up #1 (due Week 3): 1 page description of your final paper topic, 1 page discussion of information technology literacy as relevant to your chosen professional path.

Write up #2 (due Week 4): How do questions of architecture structure the technology you have chosen?

Write up #3: (due Week 5): How has the technology you describe been designed? How did the designers find out about user experience? Was there a specific methodology used?

Write up #4 (due Week 6): What are the major standards operating with regard to your topic? From which other standardization efforts did these grow from? What are the major elements of tension in the design of these standards? Who is sitting at the standards table?

Write up #5: (due Week 8): What role does middleware play in your chosen topic?

Write up #6 (due Week 9): What role do network issues (type, bandwidth, quality, pricing) play in your chosen topic?

Final paper will be worth 60%; Write-up will be worth 5% each; 10% will go to class participation.

Required and Suggested Readings

Required

David G. Messerchmitt, Networked Applications: A Guide to the New Networked Infrastructure, Morgan Kaufman, 1999. This textbook was written with LIS and Management audiences, and is being used at LIS schools at Michigan and Berkeley among others. It is available at the Lu Valle Commons Bookstore, as well as through online booksellers.

All other readings are available online (most can only be accessed from a UCLA connected computer, or using a proxy server mechanism).

Suggested

These are two books which attempt to explain the inner working of a computer in a non-technical way:

Charles Petzold, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, Microsoft Press, 2000.

Daniel Hillis, Patterns on the Stone, Perseus, 1999.

Course schedule

Ñ Week 1 (January 10/11): Information Technology Literacy

Read

David Bawden, ÒInformation and Digital Literacies: A Review of Concepts,Ó Journal of Documentation, 57(2): 218-259.

http://gti1.edu.um.es:8080/jgomez/hei/intranet/bawden.pdf

D. Scott Brandt, ÒInformation Technology Literacy: Task Knowledge and Mental ModelsÓ, Library Trends 50(1):73-86

http://wilsontxt.hwwilson.com/pdffull/01862/marm7/8sb.pdf

Sanna Talja, ÒThe Social and Discursive Construction of Computing SkillsÓ, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 56(1):13-22.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/109594703/PDFSTART

Browse

National Research Council, Being Fluent with Information Technology, Washington 1999.

http://stills.nap.edu/html/beingfluent/

ALA /ACRL ÒInformation Literacy Competency Standards for Higher EducationÓ

http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlstandards/informationliteracycompetency.htm#iltech

SAAÕs guidelines on professional education and information technology

http://www.archivists.org/prof-education/ed_guidelines.asp

Ñ Week 2 (January 17/18): Applications

Note: Monday 1/17 class meets on Wednesday 1/19, from 6-9h30 PM, GSEIS 111.

Read

Messerchmitt, Chapter 1 and 2

Martin Campbell-Kelly, ÒPunched-Card MachineryÓ, chapter four of Computing Before Computers (William Aspray, ed.), Iowa State University Press, 1990.

http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/CBC.html#toc

Survey: E-Commerce, The Economist, May 13th 2004.

http://www.economist.com/surveys/showsurvey.cfm?issue=20040515

Rich Ling, Ò ÔÔWe Release Them Little by LittleÕÕ: Maturation and Gender Identity as Seen in the Use of Mobile TelephonyÓ, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (2001) 5:123Ð136.

http://springerlink.metapress.com/link.asp?id=7fv9f7cfmn1rlwar

Ñ Week 3 (January 24/25): Software and hardware architecture

Read

Messerchmitt, Chapter 3 + 4.1, 4.2

ÒThe Brawn Behind EBay's Always-On Auctions,Ó Information Week, Dec. 10 2001.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20011207S0003

ÒManaging E-Commerce Reliability, eBay StyleÓ, IT Pro, March/April 2000.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org:80/iel5/6294/18131/00839378.pdf?isNumber=18131&arnumber=839378&prod=JNL&arSt=80&ared=79&arAuthor=Lear%2C+A.C.

Due

Write up #1: final paper topic + IT litteracy

Ñ Week 4 (January 31/February 1): Software development and acquisition

Read

Messerchmitt, Chapter 6

E. Georgiadou, ÒSoftware Process and Product Improvement: A historical PerspectiveÓ, Cybernetics and Systems Analysis, Vol. 39, No. 1.

http://ipsapp009.kluweronline.com/IPS/content/ext/x/J/4570/I/15/A/12/abstract.htm

Antony Bryant, ÒMetaphor, myth and mimicry: The bases of software engineeringÓ Annals of Software Engineering 10 (2000) 273Ð292.

http://ipsapp009.kluweronline.com/IPS/content/ext/x/J/4496/I/7/A/9/abstract.htm

Brian M. Landry, Jeffrey S. Pierce and Charles L. Isbell Jr, ÒSupporting routine decision-making with a next-generation alarm clockÓ, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (2004) 8: 154Ð160.

http://springerlink.metapress.com/link.asp?id=g4x7g11g84eqrrwy

Jennifer A. Rode, Eleanor F. Toye and Alan F. Blackwell, ÒThe fuzzy felt ethnographyÑunderstanding the programming patterns of domestic appliancesÓ, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (2004) 8: 161Ð176

http://springerlink.metapress.com/link.asp?id=ggjfnl3e8dpa47fn

Due

Write up #2: architecture

Ñ Week 5 (February 7/8): Standards and markets

Read

Messerchmitt, Chapter 4.3 + 5

Hal Varian, ÒEconomics of Information TechnologyÓ

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/mattioli/mattioli.pdf

Martin Libicki, James Schneider, Dave R. Frelinger, and Anna Slomovic, ÒScaffolding the New Web: Standards and Standards Policy for the Digital Economy,Ó

http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1215/

Due

Write up #3: software development

Ñ Week 6 (February 14/15): Programming

Bakhtiar Mikhak et al., ÒTo Mindstorms and Beyond: Evolution of a Construction Kit for Magical MachinesÓ in Robots for Kids: Exploring New Technologies for Learning Experiences. (Edited by Allison Druin, published by Morgan Kaufman and Academic Press, San Francisco, March, 2000).

http://www.wellesley.edu/Physics/Rberg/papers/magical-machines.pdf

A cute little overview of a whole bunch of programming languages

http://microsoft.toddverbeek.com/lang.html

A great poster that shows the relationships between different programming lanuguages

http://www.oreilly.com/news/graphics/prog_lang_poster.pdf

The first five sections of chapter one of this introduction are useful:

http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/

http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/c1/index.html (start here)

This is a great resource for learning programming using Scheme (a simple version of Lisp), which is my absolute favorite language in the world. Also on the site, versions of Scheme interpreters for every platform, and the book, which is entirely available online, takes you through to all the steps. If I ever teach a programming course, I would use this book for sure!

http://www.htdp.org/2003-09-26/Book/

An article by Alan Kay (adjunct professor in the CS department here at UCLA; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay). The article describes the birth of Smalltalk, an important object-oriented language. Parts of the article will be unintelligible to you (and to me as well) but it's a remarkable interesting and pleasurable read, full of fuzzy diagrams and pictures.

Alan Kay, Early history of smalltalk

http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html, or

http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=155364&type=pdf&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=37667040&CFTOKEN=61746690

Browse this site to get a feel for the programmer's lifestyle:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/

Ñ Week 7 (February 21/22): Distributing Applications

Note: Monday 2/21 class meets on Wednesday 2/23, from 6-9h30 PM, GSEIS 111.