Projects | Selected Past Projects | Tech-Society Education Research
Tech-Society Education Research
The CIS is researching university efforts to teach and research how the evolution of information communications technologies (ICTs) change society. From explorations in law schools of privacy and intellectual property rights in a digital age, to business schools that offer e-business and e-marketing courses, to public affairs courses that consider how the Internet changes democracy, to computer science courses intended for non-majors that introduce both how a particular technology works and its impact on society, many university departments offer courses that touch on some aspect of the intersection of digital technology and society. These curricular efforts are often complemented by ICT-society research centers.
While the issues these courses and research programs explore may overlap from one university to the next, few universities seem to share a common vision of what it means to teach and research how technology is changing society. Interpretations and approaches are many. Some universities offer a fully-fledged program of study within their law, business or public affairs schools which cover topics relevant to these professional fields. Others offer stand-alone majors in science, technology and society, or in Internet studies, which seek to integrate multiple disciplines. Yet others may offer just a course or two in a given department on some aspect of how technology is changing society. Some universities have research centers housed within a particular department while others have university-wide ICT-society study centers and pick research projects to pursue in a few areas of their choosing. Some programs are technical, and others non-technical or a fusion of technical and non-technical.
CIS research efforts seek to catalog and analyze the various attempts to define ICT-society research and curricular agendas in leading universities. We hope to find out how universities arrived at their particular formulas for exploring how ICTs are changing society. How are universities responding to technology's growing influence on society-what sorts of courses and programs and projects do they offer and why? Are student interests being met by the current curricular structures? How well have universities integrated the technical and non-technical dimensions of this field? Why do some universities seem to de-emphasize the study of ICTs influence on society, as evidenced by their lack of courses and research projects in this area? Are the topics included in ICT-society studies so diverse that technology's impact on society is best studied from within an individual department from a particular disciplinary angle? Or is ICT-society studies an emerging discipline, a field unto itself?
This research will inform our work at the University of Washington as well as aid us in carrying out some of our projects with developing world universities and the Internet Political Economy Forum .
Technology & Society Programs
Numerous universities around the world have established programs that address various dimensions of technology and society. Here is a sampling of this community.
North America
Center for Information Policy, University of Maryland
Internet Studies Center, University of Minnesota
Internet Studies Program, Brandeis University
Communication, Culture & Technology Program, Georgetown University
Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University
Research Program on Communications Policy , MIT
Asia
Information and Communications Management Programme, National University of Singapore
Center for Electronic Commerce & Internet Studies, Mudoch University, Australia
Internet Studies Center, Curtin University, Australia
Europe/Middle East
Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University, UK
Internet Interdisciplinary Research Institute, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain
Center for Internetforskning, Aarhus University, Denmark
Center for the Study of the Information Society (InfoSoc), University of Haifa, Israel
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