Sunday, November 29, 2009

Don't Forget to Read the Newspaper

I know graduate students have busy lives balancing academic and personal responsibilities. However, all students should stay abreast of what's happening in the world. It is easy to live in a bubble in school. I have listed my favorite news websites at the local, national, and international level:

Local and University News

National News

International News

News Channels

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!

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Video: What Is Social Work?

I have been receiving multiple queries about what is social work. I found this Youtube video which was created for a social welfare course at Boston University. I think they described the broad field of social work superbly. The video also has the "We Are the World" background music theme.

The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) also has an outreach website to educate and recruit students into the profession. It lists 50 biographies of social workers who are making a difference in a variety of backgrounds (clinican, therapist, consultant, executive director, professor, administrator, etc.).



Social workers engage in multiple roles:

  • Advocate
  • Educator
  • Broker
  • Activist
  • Negotiator
  • Group facilitator
  • Counselor
  • Researcher
  • Enabler
  • Initiator
  • Empowerer
  • Mediator