Just walking through the Beta House building Friday, we could imagine whiteboard walls and tables, interactive monitors in the dormant fireplaces, localized soundproofing for designated quiet areas, re-usable projection areas, and even trains delivering messages throughout the building. With funding substantial and plans for moving underway, the time to impact the design of such spaces is running out, but the current atmosphere is one of inclusiveness. Current students and alumni need to get involved with the spaces we will be asked to use and support as part of the School of Informatics family.
Blog Fatigue
BlogSchmog serves as an academic and family archive for the Makices, the primary consumers of this site. We love the idea of people sharing our lives and our ideas, but we are motivated to write as a way of processing the bits and pieces going through our lives. While some may experience blog fatigue as an aversion to the daily grind of publication, my fatigue comes from the overwhelming amount of information I can’t process.
A Philosophy of Teaching
As a professional artifact, my limited encounters with teaching philosophy documents as a consumer have been disillusioning (read: the philosophy and the practice are rarely in sync). As a personal exercise, though, constructing and iterating a philosophy statement is a valuable form of reflection. I posted an early draft of my own statement on teaching.
Re-mediated Movie Trailers
About a year ago, some amateurs started publishing remediated videos on YouTube. They took existing movie trailers and re-edited them with different background music, custom voiceovers and interstitial text to tell a much different story than what the movie was actually about. The first of these to pass through my email in-box was a recut of The Shining, Stephen King’s horror novel turned Jack Nicholson vehicle about a mad, murderous writer. The remediation turned it into a feel-good discovery film about relationships, complete with a Peter Gabriel soundtrack.
The Dissociative Identity of Social Psychology
My sociology minor kick-started a four-course track over the next two years with an Introduction to Social Psychology course. My first attempt to synthesize the reading was painfully slow and uncertain. The fractured history of social psychology, though, may be very relevant to my main course of study: Informatics. Will there one day soon be a data informatics that slightly differs from a sociological informatics and computer science informatics, all equally relevant but not communicating in ways beneficial to the questions they try to answer?
What is Informatics?
We get asked that question a lot. By friends, by family members, by businesses. The truth is, there is no single definition. Even in places where it has been in vogue for years, like Scandinavia and Korea, the term is applied in disparate ways. If you ask the faculty and administrators at the IU School of Informatics, it is up to the doctoral students—as the first group of academics with a degree in the field—to address the problem of definition. My own definition has iterated to include that broader need to apply to all informatics fields.
Hey, (new) Docs
Orientation Week for the Indiana University School of Informatics involves full days of interaction with faculty, mingling and bonding with classmates, and information overload from every administrator who stands up and speaks. This orientation is a bit special for two reasons. First, we have a new dean meeting students for the first time. Second, we continue to grow in size as a community through the addition of a new crop of Ph.D. students. I got a sampler of both on Wednesday when Bobby Schnabel had an informal Q&A with the incoming class of doctoral students.