Information Systems in the Docuverse

1
Information Systems in the Docuverse

• Ian Beeson and Chris Wallace
• University of the West of England
• Bristol UK
• ian.beeson_at_uwe.ac.uk
• chris.wallace_at_uwe.ac.uk

2
information systems moments in time

• information systems emerged in a particular
  historical period
• expansion of computing into commercial domains
  (50s/60s)
• mainframes in the basement
• bespoke systems designed for particular
  organisations
• the discipline of information systems has its
  roots here
• everything has changed at least two major
  points of inflection
• PCs and LANs from 1980s
• WWW from mid 1990s

3
what now in our information systems?

• weve gone from
• structured records and databases with limited
  local scope to hypermedia documents of
  organisational, transorganisational or global
  scope
• bounded systems to pervasive media
• limited bespoke applications to ravenous packages
  and platforms
• IT outside us and controllable to IT within the
  life-world
• what then should we teach?
• and how should we teach it?

4
comings and goings in the Docuverse

• the WWW looks like a realisation of the hoped for
  docuverse (Bush, Englebart, Nelson)
• and it is a massive highly interlinked collection
  of documents
• but without overall coherence and containing the
  seeds of its own dissolution
• Landow notes fragmentation, blurrings,
  borderlessness
• documents blur into processes
• a browser doesnt care if a document is real
  (stored in a repository) or fugitive (generated a
  few milliseconds ago)

5
some things we should teach

• current technologies and tools in the domain of
  document engineering
• with XML at the centre
• appropriate programming and scripting languages
  to complement the markup effort
• information search and retrieval
• categorisation and classification, ontologies
• process models and architectures
• information design and architectures

6
what about the users?

• of course the user must be central but what
  does that mean?
• requirements engineering doesnt work
• soft and sociotechnical systems methods have run
  into the ground
• need to erase user/designer boundary and work out
  of an engagement with the technology
• need a new social theory
• social perspectives on IT seem to have
  disappeared (into other disciplines?)
• vital to try again - Latour, Lash?

7
how can we teach this?

• it no longer works to introduce the technologies
  from some higher ground
• theyre too embedded in our, and especially the
  students, lives
• social and historical perspectives definitely
  needed, but we cant start from there and zoom in
  on the technology
• our educational programmes must be grounded in an
  immersion in the technologies
• from where we draw out the critical angles
• but how, exactly, to organise this?
• and how to engage the teaching staff?

8
no firm ground for our pontifications

• the Berners-Lee explosion
• The variety of technologies, applications and
  information sources is exploding at a rate
  reminiscent of the Cambrian explosion of species.
  The pre-condition of stability required for
  theory- making and sound decision-making seem to
  have ceased to exist.
• the generation gap
• Young students seem to occupy a different
  docuverse entirely, populated with text-messages,
  MySpace profiles and iPods, technologies which
  raise different issues to those of a company
  stock-control system.

9
limitless educational horizons

• lost in hyperspace
• traditionally the bounds of our expectations for
  a student have been circumscribed by lectures and
  a textbook. As we turn to using the web as a
  resource, we and they have difficulty bounding
  expectations
• its there somewhere
• many of the questions we set students to research
  for coursework have already been answered
  somewhere in the docuverse- an experienced
  navigator can find it in minutes or seconds

10
variety is the spice of life

• A typical web application uses 5 or more
  languages so students have to be multi-lingual
  from birth. The next project will require 2
  more. Teaching simply has to provide a
  conceptual framework in which students can make
  sense of this variety.
• Patterns is a resource being developed at UWE to
  explore the common problems that any language has
  to solve
• How to join strings
• How to intersperse code and text, or L1-code with
  L2-code

11
assigned to the world stage

• programming as a social act
• The Berners-Lee explosion generates a level of
  excitement and reward that is new to computing.
  No longer must a student create a program which
  no-one but the tutor sees. Now she can create a
  new application or an new information source
  which is available to billions of people within
  hours of completion, hundreds of whom will help
  to improve it.
• Mashups are sociable software - FlickrWord
• open source projects require social as well as
  technical skills e.g SourceForge
• Should all our students work on these rather than
  make-work assignments and projects?

12
criticism in the midst of engagement

• users to critics
• In the days of Mainframe information systems,
  most students had never seen an information
  system and were only very peripheral users
  (paying the utility bill)
• In the WWW, students are deeply involved users of
  dozens of applications
• MySpace, Blogger, Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube
• These are rich sources of design ideas,
  developers discussion and comprehension
  exercises.