Opportunity Recognition:Technology & Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley
Instructor: Drew Isaacs
This course is intended to provide the core skills needed for the identification of opportunities that can lead to successful, entrepreneurial high technology ventures, regardless of the individual's "home" skill set, whether technical or managerial. We examine in depth the approaches most likely to succeed for entrepreneurial companies as a function of markets and technologies. Emphasis is placed on the special requirements for creating and executing strategy in a setting of rapid technological change and limited resources. This course is open to both MBA and Engineering students (who enroll through the College of Engineering), and is particularly suited for those who anticipate founding or operating technology companies.

Professional Skills Workshop
Instructor: Michael Schaffer
As information and information systems projects have become increasingly strategic, information workers at all levels and in all environments must demonstrate higher levels of professionalism, not only to perform their duties competently, but to remain competitive in the job market. This course, in conjunction with the School of Information final project, gives students insight into the source and best practice of professionalism, and gives students the chance to refine the essential skills in a simulated but realistic working environment.

Information Systems Clinic: Project Development
Instructor: Eric Kansa
This course introduces students to the fundamentals of developing information service consulting and project management. It focuses on ways to apply theoretical and conceptual knowledge to problem solving and project development. The goal of the Clinic is to provide students with hands-on experience in applying theoretical and conceptual knowledge toward practical problem-solving in designing and implementing new information services. The Spring Semester focuses on project development, implementation, and closure activities. Understanding and experience with this process will be as important as the final deliverable. Transparency in each step of project development is required and will help ensure the continued sustainability of the project.

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Fall 2007

Needs and Usability Assessment
Instructor: Nancy van House
This course addresses concepts and methods of needs and usability assessment. The emphasis will be on understanding users' needs and practices and translating them into design decisions. Topics to be covered include: methods of identifying and describing user needs and requirements; user centered design; and evaluation of information systems. We will practice a number of major usability assessment methods, including heuristic evaluation, surveys and focus groups, and naturalistic/ethnographic methods. Finally, we will discuss methods of bringing needs and usability assessment into the design process. Students will complete at least one major group project related to needs assessment and evaluation

The Quality of Information
Instructors: Paul Duguid and Geoff Nunberg
This course explores issues of information quality in mediated communication and how people reach conclusions about the reliability, value, or authenticity of content. We will consider the problem across time, media and modes, from the coming of the book to the blog, paying particular attention to the interaction of technology, communicative forms, market forces, and institutional and legal frameworks.

Seminar for Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business
Instructor: Marti Hearst
Web search engines (such as Google and Yahoo) are technologies which have enormous influence on how people find and think about information. In this course students will first gain an understanding of the basics of how search engines work, and then explore how search engine design impacts business and culture. Topics include search advertising and auctions, search and privacy, search ranking, internationalization, anti-spam efforts, local search, peer-to-peer search, and search of blogs and online communities.

Theory and Practice of Tangible Interfaces
Instructor: Kimiko Ryokai
This course will explore the theory and practice of Tangible User Interfaces, a new approach to HCI which focuses on the physical interaction with computational media. The topics covered in the course include:

* Theoretical framework of Tangible User Interfaces
* Design examples of Tangible User Interfaces
* Enabling technologies for Tangible User Interfaces

Students will design and develop experimental Tangible User Interfaces, applications, underlying technologies, and theories using concept sketches, posters, physical mockups, working prototypes, and a final project report.

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Spring 2007

Social and Organizational Issues of Information
Instructor: Coye Cheshire
The relationship between information and information systems, technology, practices, and artifacts on how people organize their work, interact, and understand experience. Individual, group, organizational, and societal issues in information production and use, information systems design and management, and information and communication technologies. Social science research methods for understanding information issues.

Information Law and Policy
Instructor: Pam Samuelson
This course introduces students to the accident-prone intersection of information technology and law. Regulation, notably but not exclusively intellectual property laws, increasingly dictates both the development and use of new information technologies. As the global marketplace moves to an information economy, the stakes political, economic, and social become higher and the skirmishes at the border erupt into regulatory battles and full-scale information wars. The course introduces a number of important topics essential to the practice of any IT profession, including copyright and other forms of legal protection for databases, licensing of information, consumer protection, liability for insecure systems and defective information, privacy, and national and international information policy.

User Interface Design and Development
Instructor: Marti Hearst
User interface design and human-computer interaction. Examination of alternative design. Tools and methods for design and development. Human- computer interaction. Methods for measuring and evaluating interface quality.
This course covers the design, prototyping, and evaluation of user interfaces to computers which is often called Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). It is loosely based on course CS1 described in the ACM SIGCHI Curricula for Human-Computer Interaction (Association for Computing Machinery, 1992).

HCI covers many topics including:
  · Human capabilities (e.g., visual and auditory perception, memory, mental models, and interface metaphors);
  · Interface technology (e.g., input and output devices, interaction styles, and common interface paradigms); and,
  · Interface design methods (e.g., user-centered design, prototyping, and design principles and rules), and interface evaluation (e.g., software logging, user observation, benchmarks and experiments).


This material is covered through lectures, reading, discussions, homework assignments, and a course project.
  · There is an emphasis on interfaces for information technology applications; and,
  · There is less emphasis on programming and system development, although some simple prototyping (for example, in visual basic or using JAVA GUI development tools) may be required.

UI tools
Instructor: Lisa Hankin
Discussion and tutorials on various UI design tools. Learn how to use software packages including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Visio to create various UI deliverables including user flows, wire frames, high-fidelity prototypes. Additionally, review basic and advanced HTML and CSS techniques.

Strategic Computing and Communications Technology
Instructor: Hal Varian
Factors strongly impacting the success of new computing and communications products and services (based on underlying technologies such as electronics and software) in commercial applications. Technology trends and limits, economics, standardization, intellectual property, government policy, and industrial organizations. Strategies to manage the design and marketing of successful products and services.

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Fall 2006

Web-Based Services
Instructor: Erik Wilde
Web-based services have become popular since the Web was invented in 1989. The first wave of Web-based services were user interfaces to systems which before the Web could not be easily accessed over the network. This development made the Web as successful as it is today, as a medium delivering a globally accessible interface to services. The second wave of Web-based services are Web Services, using basic Web technologies (HTTP/XML) and robust protocols (WS-*) for implementing application programming interfaces and business-class composite applications. A more recent third wave of Web-based services uses lighter-weight protocols and ad-hoc design approaches to merge or mash-up information or services for use primarily by individuals. In this course, all facets of Web-based services will be examined, starting with server-side technologies for the Web, and then moving on to Web Services basics (SOAP/WSDL). Coordination and orchestration of Web Services are covered with BPEL, user interfaces to Web Services (XForms), and questions of how to design Web Services (openness and extensibility) are discussed as well.

Information Organization and Retrieval
Instructor: Bob Glushko
This course introduces the intellectual foundations of information organization and retrieval: conceptual modeling, semantic representation, vocabulary and metadata design, classification, and standardization, as well as information organization and retrieval practices, technology, and applications, including computational processes for analyzing information in both textual and non-textual formats. Students will learn how information organization and retrieval is carried out by professionals, authors, and users; by individuals in association with other individuals, and as part of the business processes in an enterprise and across enterprises.

Distributed Computing Applications and Infrastructure
Instructor: John Chuang
Technological foundations for computing and communications: computer architecture, operating systems, networking, middleware, security. Programming paradigms: object oriented-design, design and analysis of algorithms, data structures, formal languages. Distributed-system architectures and models, inter-process communications, concurrency, system performance.

XML Foundations
Instructor: Erik Wilde
The Extensible Markup Language (XML), with its ability to define formal structural and semantic definitions for metadata and information models, is the key enabling technology for information services and document-centric business models that use the Internet and its family of protocols. This course introduces XML syntax, transformations, schema languages, and the querying of XML databases. It balances conceptual topics with practical skills for designing, implementing, and handling conceptual models as XML schemas.

Information Technology and Identity: The Future of Storytelling
Instructor: Quentin Hardy
Mass communications technologies have been profound influencers of human identity, from the printing press and the rise of vernacular political cultures to television and the power of celebrity. While the Web is still a work in progress, salient characteristics such as the collapse of distance, the discovery of like-minded groups, and information delivered in short bursts are already affecting the way people see themselves and the way they consume information. Following an overview on the relationship of technology with identity and communications, the course will look at the uses of narrative in news, public relations, advertising, entertainment, and online gaming.

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