Book Title: Information, People, and Technology

Book Description

This book was created through a unique process that leveraged:

• BBookX, a recommender engine that helped to identify and link various topics together.
• Wikipedia, one of the largest bodies of open content available on the web.
• Instructor Bart Pursel, who continually updates, edits, and adjusts the book throughout each semester.

This book is entirely open and free, build on the foundations of Wikipedia content, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. At the top of each page of content in the book, you will find a URL that links to the Wikipedia page that acted as the foundation for that specific page. Some pages have a lot of edits or additional content made by Bart Pursel, while other pages only represent the information found on the linked wikipedia page.

University Bulletin Information about IST 110

Three perspectives (or facets) address the core issues: information or the basic science of data encoding, transmission and storage; people or the interactions among technologies, institutions, regulations and users; and technology or the design and operation of basic information technology devices. Students completing the course will be confident users and consumers of information technology. Students will develop research and analytical skills to evaluate specific devices and understand how those devices function in larger socio-technical systems. Students will be able to predict and anticipate the impact of new technologies on human institutions as well as understand the potential impact of institutions on the use and design of information technologies.

The course employs an action-oriented approach. Students learn by doing—formulating and solving problems drawn from professional contexts, detecting and recovering from errors related to technology use, and locating, reading and studying materials that support their analysis and problem-solving. Students will accomplish this by participating in team-based learning. The course provides students with the opportunity to use, modify, and evaluate software to search for, frame, and express ideas with fluency. A variety of mechanisms are used to assess student performance. These evaluation methods typically include exams, quizzes, homework assignments, group projects, and peer and self-assessments.

IST 110 is the introductory course in IST, and, as such, serves as a prerequisite for 200-level (intermediate) IST courses. It is a required course for all majors and minors in IST, and meets requirements for a General Education or Bachelor of Arts Social Science (GS) course.

The course is delivered with significant student interaction with technology. At University Park, it is offered in multiple sections (typically 40-60 students per section), in the Fall and Spring semesters. At other Penn State campuses, it would be offered in class sizes typically ranging between 20-50 students.

General Education: GS
Diversity: None
Bachelor of Arts: None
Effective: Summer 200