The Center for Information Policy Research announces its 2007-08 Information Ethics Fellows

The Center for Information Policy Research (CIPR) at the School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is pleased to announce its 2007-08 Information Ethics Fellows. The IE Fellows Program was initiated in 2006 to highlight prominent scholars in the information ethics field, and to promote innovative research in IE. For its second year, the Fellows Program includes two Senior Fellows, who are established scholars in the field, and two Junior Fellows, who are emerging scholars in the IE field and show particular promise to make significant contributions to the IE research base. Senior Fellows are appointed, while Junior Fellows are selected through a competitive process.

The 2007-08 IE Fellows:

Senior Fellows:

Dr. Rafael Capurro, Founder and Director of the International Center for Information Ethics, and Editor, International Review of Information Ethics. Dr. Capurro’s work will focus on cross-cultural issues in information ethics.
Dr. Robert Hauptman, Professor Emeritus, St. Cloud University, Editor, Journal of Information Ethics, Dr. Hauptman will explore authorial ethics.

Junior Fellows:

Marianne Ryan, Doctoral Candidate, School of Information, University of Michigan, who will explore the process of online informed consent and its reinterpretation in light of the dynamic co-production experience within virtual worlds.
Jeremy Hunsinger, Doctoral Candidate, Science and Technology in Society, Virginia Tech, who will continue his work examining the construction of norms within the interfaces of open source software production and how that structures the mode of production of the internet.

The Fellows spend time in residence at the CIPR, contributing to its Colloquia and Occasional Paper series, and lecturing in SOIS courses. Fellows receive a stipend and access to the CIPR Resource Center, and engage in collaborative work with CIPR Faculty Associates.

The 2006-07 Fellows include Dr. Charles Ess, who focused on east-west perspectives on information and computer ethics, and Dr. Toni Samek, who presented her work on information work and human rights worldwide.

The CIPR's research agenda revolves around social, ethical, economic, legal, and technical aspects of information and information technologies with a focus on such key information policy issues as intellectual property (copyright, patents, etc.), privacy, equity of access to information, ethics of information use and service, censorship, cyberlaw, and government, corporate, and international information policies.

The CIPR reflects the mission and philosophy of the School of Information Studies: Information, our focus; interdisciplinary, our mindset; and international, our scope.

All CIPR lectures are streamed and archived at http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/SOIS/cipr/archive.html

For more information, contact cipr@sois.uwm.edu or Elizabeth Buchanan, Director, CIPR, at buchanan@sois.uwm.edu.

School of Information Studies appoints Terrance Newell

The UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies is pleased to announce the appointment of Terrance Newell as assistant professor, starting in the Summer of 2007. Passionate about research and teaching and thoroughly integrating innovative technologies into both, he will provide additional depth and breadth to the SOIS research and teaching programs. Not counting adjunct instructors, this will bring the total SOIS faculty and teaching staff to 27.

Dr. Newell comes to UW-Milwaukee from Florida State University, where he has been a faculty member in the College of Information. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of Library and Information Studies (with a minor in Instructional Systems Technology) and has additional degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi (M.S., Library and Information Science, and teaching certification for Social Science Education) and Mississippi Valley State University (B.S., History).

His dissertation, Rethinking Information Literacy Learning Environments: A Study to Examine the Effectiveness of Two Learning Approaches, addresses issues related to information literacy in two settings. One environment involves a project using a collaborative, constructivist approach to information literacy and the other fuses socio-cultural constructivism, semiotic domain theory, and a multimodal view of information literacy and immersive technology (virtual reality), to create environments within which students can develop information literacy through experiences and interactions.

His work is interdisciplinary and connected to cultural and media studies, visual studies, communications, linguistics, education, computer science, educational psychology, and instructional systems technology. He sees his research developing in three primary areas: 1) mediating information literacy learning using socio-cultural learning theories coupled with immersive technologies such as virtual reality, 2) laying a theoretical substratum of multimodal information literacy, and 3) interrogating the dynamic relationships among learners, information educators, teaching/learning communities and learning tools/objects that are mediated by information literacy learning approaches.

Dr. Newell is passionate about teaching. He sees his teaching role as a critical site of struggle from which we can shift the center of thought within the field, promoting a discussion of ideas and practices from the central traditional core to the margins of emerging thought. An example of an innovative course he is teaching, “Design and Production of Networked Multimedia,” provides students with an opportunity to learn the knowledge and social practices of multimodal/multimedia design, production and dissemination, with a particular focus on designing for activity systems. He incorporates 3D virtual reality to simulate various socio-cultural contexts within which students can employ theoretical lens and social practices and experience particular communities of practice. In the School of Information Studies, his teaching will span several subjects and include graduate and undergraduate courses, from core courses in the MLIS, to specialized courses, such as one for which he is currently preparing a proposal, “Information Literacy & Video/Computer Games."

Dr. Newell’s wife, Markeda Newell, has recently been appointed Assistant Professor in the UWM School of Education, effective Fall, 2007. Currently finishing her dissertation at Florida State University and completing an internship in FSU’s Multidisciplinary Evaluation and Consulting Center, she also received degrees from UW-Madison and the University of Southern Mississippi. Her research focuses on theoretical and practical understandings of racial and ethnic diversity in educational settings. Among her various approaches, one involves the creation of desktop virtual realities used to construct sophisticated 3D semi-immersion experiences in which the participants find themselves in highly interactive, multi-sensory, artificial environments that are so vivid that they appear real. The purpose of such virtual environments is to create dynamic, simulated consultation situations, which are used to analyze the activity of practitioners.

SOIS welcomes Terrance and Markeda Newell to UW-Milwaukee, looks forward to their contributions to the instructional and research missions of the University, and anticipates that future interdisciplinary collaborations will be mutually beneficial.

Center for Information Policy Research Announces Spring Colloquia

The UW-Milwaukee, School of Information Studies, Center for Information Policy Research (CIPR), announces its Spring 2007 Colloquium Series. Established in 1998 and directed by Elizabeth Buchanan since August 2006, CIPR facilitates information policy research through its lecture series, research paper series, and outreach activities, and its information ethics fellows program. The Center's research agenda revolves around social, ethical, economic, legal, and technical aspects of information and information technologies with a focus on such key information policy issues as intellectual property (copyright, patents, etc.), privacy, equity of access to information, ethics of information use and service, censorship, cyberlaw, and government, corporate, and international information policies.

The Spring 2007 International Information Policy Colloquia feature Toni Samek (February 22), Jacques du Plessis (March 9), Catherine Johnson (March 28), and Siva Vaidhyanathan (May 12), who concludes the season as the speaker for the annual Ted Samore Lecture. The lectures are free and open to the public.