Information School News

A big welcome to all the new students joining us in the Department of Information Studies University of Sheffield this week on our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes!

Paul Clough is speaking at a GIS workshop in York on The Cultural Heritage of Historic European Cities and Public Participatory GIS http://www.york.ac.uk/res/isthmus/ISTHMUS_Site/Public_Participatory_GIS.html

Transcripts of the chat conversation from the last 5 discussion/presentation sessions held in Second Life (the virtual world) are available. This is the Centre for Information Literacy Research (CILR) series. There are links to material from all previous sessions (about 30) at http://infolitischool.pbworks.com/Past+events If you have a Second Life avatar, you can also go inworld and find boards with links and notecards in the CILR on Infolit iSchool at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/107/223/22/ The events, which took place in July and August 2009, were: Report on IL at the IFLA 2009 Conference; EDINA and SL (discussion); Information providers in a virtual world (research presentation); Intellectual Property (IP) and SL (discussion); Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) and the First Year Experience (FYE)(research presentation)

Paul Clough is going to be PC co-chair of ECIR 2011. This conference is the best IR conference in Europe and ranks 3rd in all the IR conferences there are.

Speaker: Nashrawan Taha A Study of the Evolution of Networks among International Students in Formal Learning Communities Wednesday, 9th September, 13.00 RC204 Social network analysis (SNA) has been used to study the pattern of interaction among learners in different online and offline communities. However, there is still not much research that focuses on the study of the evolution of the social network in a face to face formal learning context. By combining the use of SNA and qualitative data, this research aims to study the social network evolution of international students and the factors that shaped these changes in a face to face formal learning context. Combining social network analysis and qualitative methods, helps to provide a fuller picture of the network and obtain better quality and more accurate data. This research also explores the role of Web 2.0 in general, and Social Bookmarking technology in particular, in studying the social network relations.

Risk Management in Information System Development Projects in the Thai Context Speaker: Nipon Parinyavuttichai Thursday, 10th September, 12.00 RC204 Information System (IS) companies have invested a large amount of effort and resource in developing IS projects. However, many IS projects still underperform, over run their budgets, or even end in failure. Hence, it is important to identify risks behind the development of IS projects (ISD) and implement appropriate risk management practices to the IS projects. Once these IS risk management activities are put into action, IS projects trapped in a failing course of action can be turned around to successful projects. This research aims to 1) understand how an IS project evolves over a period of development, 2) identify and analyse risks contributing to the outcome of an IS project, and 3) examine how risks identified from the project are developed and managed throughout the IS project. In order to achieve these objectives, case study...

Research Seminar Sayed Jalal Naser Thursday September 3rd (12.00, RC204) Since it was declared as Kingdom in 2002, where municipal elections and parliamentary elections were held in the same year, Bahrain has taken a strategic decision to the application of ICT in boosting the democratic operations. Bahrain has partially applied e-Voting in 2002 parliamentary election, and has prepared for its full application in 2006 election. However a sudden decision was taken to put 2006 e-Voting programme on hold till 2010. Within the above framework, studying the barriers and exploring the challenges facing applying e-Voting in Bahrain represent the area of the research described by this presentation. The research aimed in particularly at investigating what determines Bahrainis voters’ evaluation of the trustworthiness of an e-Voting solution. The study follows a mixed research strategy for building and expanding the theory. The first stage which would be a qualitative one includes interviewing M...

Sheila Webber was attending the World Library and Information Conference last week in Milan: this is the annual conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). Sheila is a new member of the IFLA Information Literacy Section Standing Committee (pictured here, she is second from the left), and she has blogged about the conference on her Information Literacy Weblog .

Professor Sheila Corrall is delivering a presentation on Information Literacy: The Case for Strategic Engagement as part of the Staff Development Week at Trinity University College, Carmarthen, which will be attended by staff from Trinity and from University of Wales Lampeter.