iSchools

What's special about iSchool?

Intuitively, iSchools conduct research concerning information. However, iSchool research tends to be more interdisciplinary than traditional disciplines, such as library science and computer science. Most iSchool researchers often consider a topic from the perspectives of people, technology and information, which constitute the triangular research theme at Penn State IST.

 

What are some of the things that most iSchools have in common?

As we mentioned before, iSchools aim at integrating people, information and technology to study phenomenon in the modern information society. One of the popular research domains in the iSchool community is Human Computer Interaction, which studies topics such as how to use technology to help human users to better find, understand and utilize the information provided by computing systems. Other commonly found topics include social and organizational informatics, information (knowledge) retrieval and management, and so on.

 

Another thing that I guess most iSchools have in common is the challenge in establishing academic identity. Let's put away the philosophy about what is a scientific discipline, pragmatically, I tend to use whether iSchools hire PhD students as faculty members from other iSchools as one of the many ways to assess the iSchool movement. If iSchools keep hiring PhDs from other disciplines while iSchool PhDs can only go to the industry, our iSchool is more like a professional training program, instead of an academic discipline. I guess the situation is getting better now but I am not 100% sure about that.

 

Another way to evaluate the maturity of an academic discipline is whether it has its own community of closely related researchers and highly respected publication outlets. So far, most iSchool researchers still tend to publish their works in venues of their own traditional specialty. This leads to the fact that, for example, Dr.Yen and Dr.Giles is still considered by many as compute scientists, instead of information scientists.

 

OK, enough challenges for iSchools to handle:)

 

What are some of the different flavors of iSchools?

This section reflects my own perception and understanding of the iSchool community. I judge the flavors of iSchools mostly based on their academic tradition.

 

Among the iSchool caucus, there are a lot of members who evolve from library science departments/schools, such as the iSchools at University of Michigan, University of Illinois and University of North Carolina. Therefore, they have a flavor in studying archiving and preservation of books, information for schools and communities, migration, management and accessibility of digital libraries.

 

iSchools at Georgia Tech and UC Irvine have strong backgrounds in computer science. Their research has a lot to do with algorithms and optimization techniques for information processing (as in bioinformatics), technologies for ubiquitous computing, computer vision and graphics.

 

There are also iSchools who focus more on the business side, such as UC Berkeley and Singapore Management University's iSchools. They are similar to the Management Information System department of business schools and have a preference over organizational informatics and database management research.

 

Besides, UCLA's iSchool is housed together with its education department and thus considers information as way to aid learning and assess/evaluate the outcome of learning. Carnegie Mellon's iSchool is actually a public policy school, which intuitively emphasizes on technology policy analysis and technology management.

 

Why did I choose IST?

Well, I would say it is mostly because of family reasons. Penn State is the last school that both my wife and I applied for, mainly because of State College's geographical location. I have some very basic ideas about what an iSchool is when I applied for PhD programs but I did not know IST is such a program.

 

Life is like a box of chocolate. It turned out Penn State is the only school that admitted both of us and we don't want to be far away from each other for 4-5 years. I had the choice to go to two traditional computer science programs or a more policy-oriented program. She also got another offer from a pretty good school. During the campus visit in February 2007, I got to know the college and became concerned with my academic identity at IST. However, I was also impressed by the hospitality, academic diversity and the friendly atmosphere in the college. After my wife got her offer from Penn State, we decided to come here together. Making decisions can often be tough, but sometimes, it is unbelievably easy:)