Hi all,
As many of you know, I've been wondering for quite some time about the basic information studies literacy we should be teaching across programmes at the university (i.e. not just humanities computing, but more broadly what should university graduates know as basic information literacy).
We're looking into establishing a campus wide certification in informatics here which we have the luxury of building more or less ex nihilo--i.e. lots of willing people and departments, very few existing institutional silos and/or jealousies that need to be worked in or around. The goal is to build this as a companion programme--something like a big minor, a certification, or an emphasis--that would in theory be open to combination any domain baccalaureate. In the end you could graduate with "English and informatics", or "Biology and informatics," etc. The informatics certification would not be intended to cover all possible informatics angles (so somebody doing bio-informatics or advanced humanities computing would have to do additional work). But the goal would be to produce students with domain competency and a core set of informatics skills and knowledge.
I am looking at some existing programmes--e.g. Melbourne, Syracuse, etc. But I'm also asking people helping put the programme together to think on the basis of a blank page: what skills, knowledge, experience should an undergraduate have when they finish such a programme. Here are some of mine. What do others think?
* Knowledge of basic internet infrastructure and protocols: what a server is, how pages are served out, what packets are, how domain-names are registered and looked up, all the various transfer protocols * Knowledge of basic languages and standards like xml, html, unicode * Experience in setting up a multipage interactive website at an arbitrary domain name (i.e. buy a domain name, point it at an IP address, set up the server, write the pages * Knowledge of the major genres and applications and an ability to analyse existing sites in terms of their use of these (e.g. know what a wiki is, newserver, version control, other things) * Have some sense of constraints that affect the use of cyberspace: gender, economic, legal issues, etc. * Have a knowledge of various social organisations and processes on the web: communities of practice, crowd sourcing * Be able to analyse information flows and other aspects of a problem and design technological solutions to it * some experience with data design, analysis, and retrieval
These seem to me to be too much of a mishmash of different types of scope, categories, and the like. And also too much focussed on the type of thing I do. Any suggestions for the skills, knowledge, and experience a typical undergraduate ought to have if they were to be certified as being basically competent in contemporary web technologies alongside their core domain?
-dan