We have been talking about iSchools and the different flavors of iSchools. Now the question is what about IST?
IST is certainly a special type of iSchool as it was built from scratch with a clear focus on the I-T-P triangle, while a lot of other iSchools evolved from traditional disciplines. I have the impression that IST is among the most diverse iSchools as it hosts researchers who come from various academic backgrounds and conduct research on a VERY broad range of topics.
Team 2 talked about the prestige of IST faculty members in their presentations but what they showed in the slides were actually how diverse the faculty body is. In fact, it is tricky to evaluate the reputation of the schooo and an IST faculty member, because IST is too diverse and faculty members from different backgrounds tend to have different criteria in evaluating the acedemic achievement of peers. I guess this is also a challenge for a lot of iSchools. This leads to another question: should IST have departments?
Having departments and grouping researchers from similar areas may make the evaluation and tenure awarding a little bit easier. However, this may hurt the identity of IST as a college. People may say that the college is just a clearinghouse where there is a group of social scientists and another group of computer scientists doing research on some new topics in the Age of Information.
If IST have departments, a challenge is to decide where people fit, as IST researchers are so inter-disciplinary that it is often difficult to describe them with a single label. For example, assume the departments are based on the PhD tracks of the new curriculum, I am not really sure which track I should pick... My research on intelligent agents and agent-based model have the origin in AI, not cognitive science though. Depending on the application area, it may also overlap with computational informatics and social/organizational informatics. I guess similar problems may also occur to some faculty members, as well as PhD students.
Actually, the recent reallocation of faculty offices based on research interests and the new PhD curriculum with tracks may signal the administration's preference on a more grouped structure within the college. I am not sure whether it is a good or bad thing but let's see how this works out.
IST is certainly a special type of iSchool as it was built from scratch with a clear focus on the I-T-P triangle, while a lot of other iSchools evolved from traditional disciplines. I have the impression that IST is among the most diverse iSchools as it hosts researchers who come from various academic backgrounds and conduct research on a VERY broad range of topics.
Team 2 talked about the prestige of IST faculty members in their presentations but what they showed in the slides were actually how diverse the faculty body is. In fact, it is tricky to evaluate the reputation of the schooo and an IST faculty member, because IST is too diverse and faculty members from different backgrounds tend to have different criteria in evaluating the acedemic achievement of peers. I guess this is also a challenge for a lot of iSchools. This leads to another question: should IST have departments?
Having departments and grouping researchers from similar areas may make the evaluation and tenure awarding a little bit easier. However, this may hurt the identity of IST as a college. People may say that the college is just a clearinghouse where there is a group of social scientists and another group of computer scientists doing research on some new topics in the Age of Information.
If IST have departments, a challenge is to decide where people fit, as IST researchers are so inter-disciplinary that it is often difficult to describe them with a single label. For example, assume the departments are based on the PhD tracks of the new curriculum, I am not really sure which track I should pick... My research on intelligent agents and agent-based model have the origin in AI, not cognitive science though. Depending on the application area, it may also overlap with computational informatics and social/organizational informatics. I guess similar problems may also occur to some faculty members, as well as PhD students.
Actually, the recent reallocation of faculty offices based on research interests and the new PhD curriculum with tracks may signal the administration's preference on a more grouped structure within the college. I am not sure whether it is a good or bad thing but let's see how this works out.
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