Saturday, November 21, 2009

Berners-Lee and Web Science

The inventor of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, wants to create a wiki consortium of universities that offer "Web Science" courses. I checked the wiki, but U-M is not mentioned anywhere on the list. The School of Information offers mutiple courses in the history of computers and information and communication technologies (ICTs).

The group, Web Science Trust, has set up a Wiki where universities offering Web-science programs can list their offerings and links to their course syllabi.

Why set up a separate Web-science program when other fields already cover the topic? "Most computers science isn't about the Web, and most information science isn't about the Web," said James Hendler, a computer-science professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who is a leader of the new effort. He named climate science as another new research area that has emerged in recent years by pulling people from different disciplines into the focused study of one area

I can't forget to say this: have a great Thanksgiving weekend!

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