Courses I Teach
Winter & SPRING - every year
ICS 207S: Doctoral Research and Writing Seminar
ICS 207S, Overview, Spring 2016
The goal of the seminar is to provide students with milestones for getting some sort of 'product' out to the group and a rhythm for writing and thinking. It also engenders shared understanding of what your colleagues' are engaged in and hopefully becomes a site for productive cross-over in ideas, literature, and writing tips. This workshop is geared toward students that are actively working on their own work and research stream.
FALL, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020
MHCID 281: Social Analysis of Computerization
A key part of developing good technology solutions is understanding what the problem is to be solved and what various good solutions might be. Learning to take a true ethnographic perspective on the real world contexts prior to design enables a multi layered perspective on what the various issues might be before attempting to solve them. This course teaches the investigative process that precedes software requirements engineering. Students will learn how to fully investigate a setting with all of the numerous complexities that inform how people experience a social and physical environment. We will explore culture, power, physical layout and the role of artifacts in flows of access and information.
FALL, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021
MANAGEMENT 200: Executive MBA, Thinking Strategically in the Digital Age (with Margarethe Wiersema)
Management 290 SYLLABUS, Fall 2020
In today’s global and digital world, success depends on understanding how technology and economic forces impact a company’s competitive position and its ability to succeed. This course focuses on the strategic and organizational challenges that managers face due to digital technology innovation and transformation. The course will utilize the tools of strategic thinking and critical thinking to provide an integrative perspective on how technological challenges can threaten and undermine conventional business models as well as provide opportunities for leaders to be innovative in developing new business models by which to create value. The course utilizes case studies on different industries subject to technological disruption to understand how digital technologies can destroy and create value. By becoming more skilled thinkers, students will enhance their capabilities to address the competitive and managerial challenges that confront organizations due to digital transformation and thus become more effective decision-makers. They will learn how to think creatively about the challenges as well as opportunities that digital technologies create and their impact on businesses in a strategic way. The emphasis on developing strategic thinking and critical thinking capabilities to compete in a dynamic environment highlights the importance of the skills and knowledge that represents the basis of the Merage MBA with its focus on leadership for a digital future.
At the strategic level, students will analyze how technology disruption impacts the structure of an industry and the implications for industry profitability. The course will highlight how technology can disrupt competitive markets and create a more complex and dynamic competitive landscape that requires a reassessment of competitive conditions and company strategy. After gaining an understanding of the strategic implications that technological disruption is likely to have in an industry, they will evaluate how business models are changing in the industry and how different players seek to create and capture value. Through the application of frameworks by which to analyze a company’s competitive context, students will broaden their perspective and learn to think strategically and thus become better adept at learning to recognize and leverage technology disruption to create value in the marketplace. By providing an integrative overview, the course highlights the importance of understanding all functional aspects of the organization and thus sets the stage for the core courses in the MBA program.
The course will also highlight how, in addition to affecting the competitive landscape, innovation stemming from digital technologies changes the nature of managing organizations. By introducing high complexity and ambiguity into organizations, digital technologies require new analytic tools to enable effective managerial action. The course will provide methodologies to critically examine organizational situations, perspective-taking methods to design proper responses, and motivational tools to engage in effective action. In particular, the course will provide students with knowledge on psychological biases that prevent critical evaluation in complex and novel situations and approaches to overcome them through the use of collective decision making, as well as knowledge on the personal and structural factors involved in managing in innovation-driven industries and across multiple international sites. Students will also learn how to analyze the organizational factors—such as opposing interests, values, and expectations that stem from organizational structure, politics, and culture—which can obstruct the design and implementation of effective resource allocation in companies where innovation and digital disruption are central.
WINTER, 2017, 2018, 2019
ICS 162W: Social Analysis of Computerization
ICS 162W SYLLABUS, Winter 2019
When you graduate, almost all of you will work in, with, for, or among organizations. Organizations are the primary developers and consumers of computer systems. More importantly, modern organizations depend critically on information and computer systems to function. Information systems and organizations are thoroughly intertwined. Most of the information system design you’re ever likely to be involved in will depend on organizational insights to be effective.
This class explores the relationships between organizations and information systems, and gives you tools for understanding and analyzing these relationships. We’ll spend some time dealing primarily with the structure and analysis of organizations, some time talking specifically about technologies that are especially relevant to organizational life, and some time introducing specific techniques for uncovering and thinking about technology in organizational settings.
SPRING 2014, 2016, 2018
Winter, 2011
ICS 263: Computerization, Work and Organizations
ICS 263, SYLLABUS, Spring 2016
This course is intended to generate understanding of the philosophical, theoretical, and empirical foundations of the social study of technology in organizations. The course involves consideration and discussion of the research literature that includes a range of social phenomena surrounding the development, implementation, use, and implications of technology in organizations. A particular focus of the discussions will be an examination of the research assumptions guiding the theoretical ideas and empirical studies conducted in this field. The readings in this course follow a trajectory from readings that will help us understand research assumptions’ underlying studies in technology and organizations, to a variety of theoretical frameworks applied to studies of technology in organizations and empirical examples of research conducted from the perspective of different research methods/assumptions and theoretical perspectives. This course would be useful for graduate students doing sociological and anthropological work in organizations. Even if one’s research focus does not directly focus on technology more and more core organizational processes and routines happen via information technologies. Therefore, developing frameworks to understand the relationship between technological infrastructure and assumptions and organizational processes is important for scholars across disciplinary traditions.
FALL, 2015, 2016
ICS 201: Research and Methods for Informatics
Informatics 201 is a PhD level course designed to introduce you to being a successful researcher in HCI, CSCW, Ubicomp, STS, Organizations and other related Informatics disciplines. This course will provide you the tools you need to dive into research with your primary advisor. Discussion is required as well as bringing in other experiences from meeting with your advisors, working with fellow graduate students, former courses at other institutions, industrial experience, and more.
In this course we will provide an overview of research methods and theoretical inquiry. It does not deal with specific techniques per se, but rather with the assumptions and the logic underlying social research. Further we will go over some of the primary communication and writing genres necessary for a successful academic career. (research paper, review).
In this course I aim for a balance between lecture and discussion. Active class interaction is critical. Readings have been selectively chosen to stimulate rich discussion. Students are expected to take the time to read thoroughly and with a critical perspective. Everyone is expected to come to class fully prepared to discuss all readings. Class participation grades will be allocated on the basis of both the quality and quantity of contributions both online and in class.
SPRING, 2013
ICS 295: Materialities of Information (with Paul Dourish)
COURSE WEBSITE - housed on Paul Dourish’s webpage
The goal of this class is to bring recent interests arising in anthropology, science studies, media studies, and organization studies in the topic of materiality into conversation with informatics and the study of the digital. The key insight that we would like to develop is that the "materiality of information" goes beyond an interest in the artifacts of information infrastructure but has insight to offer too for the constitution and consequences of digitality.
Together, we will explore a range of perspectives on the materiality of information, including questions of material culture, digital representational practice, the informational substrate, networks and spatially, and the infrastructure of digital political economy. We will do this by reading both instructor-selected and student-select materials in juxtaposition, hoping for a broad and productive interdisciplinary engagement.
FALL, 2010, 2011, 2012
Spring, 2010, 2011
ICS 161: Social Analysis of Computerization
TECHNOLOGY DISCONNECT ASSIGNMENT
Website (must have a UCI ID to access)
This course is a broad introduction of computerization as a social process. It examines the social opportunities and problems raised by new information technologies, and the consequences of different ways of organizing. You will learn to do a socio-technical historical analysis that analyzes the stakeholders, expected outcomes, and unexpected consequences that emerge as new technologies affect social structures and daily experience. Topics include: computerization as providing new ways of “seeing”; information archiving, search and locating; privacy; environmental implications of IT; the ‘self’ in a connected world; financial markets in the information age; community based research and informatics; and games and virtual worlds.
FALL, 2011, SPRING 2011
ICS 161: Social Analysis of Computerization
Website (must have a UCI ID to access)
This course is a broad introduction of computerization as a social process. It examines the social opportunities and problems raised by new information technologies, and the consequences of different ways of organizing. You will learn to do a socio-technical historical analysis that analyzes the stakeholders, expected outcomes, and unexpected consequences that emerge as new technologies affect social structures and daily experience. Topics include: computerization as providing new ways of “seeing”; information archiving, search and locating; privacy; environmental implications of IT; the ‘self’ in a connected world; financial markets in the information age; community based research and informatics; and games and virtual worlds.
1CS 207: Research and Writing Seminar
SPRING, 2011
ICS 163: Projects in the Social and Organizational Implications of Technologies-in-Use
Website (must have a UCI ID to access)
The objective of the course is to provide practical experience in researching social and organizational implications of technology. Emphasis will be placed on conducting ethnographic research, writing, and presenting. You will be part of a team project analyzing organizational process and technology-in-use at a local business, non-profit organization or service at UCI.
First, you will learn about how to design an empirical study. Even though, you have learned some of this in 161 and 162, this practicum will help you engage that material in the empirical world.
What question are you trying to answer? How should you go about attempting to answer these questions? What other factors do you need to consider when engaging in empirical research?
Second, you will learn how to gather data about people’s social and cultural environments.
Techniques will include observing social dynamics, interviewing people, and analyzing technologies-in-use. We will also discuss other techniques such as organizational documents, artifact analysis, and journals and logs. For each technique you will learn what types of question it can answer, how to go about using it, and how does it influence your study design.
Third, you will learn how to analyze the data that you collect.
Analysis is the process of taking the data that you gather and turning into a systematic set of findings that let you make claims. For example, analysis lets you say how and why an organizational process is effective or ineffective for the users or whether software needs to work a certain way in order to meet the needs of potential users. We will learn how to perform analysis on the types of data that you’ve just learned how to collect.
The goal of this class is to provide you with an introduction to how to use empirical methods and engage in data analysis to provide insight into organizational processes and technologies in-use.
At the end of this class you should be able to design a study that allows you to take a research question and answer it using appropriate data collection and analysis techniques.
SPRING, 2010
ICS 295: The connected, mediated and wired self: Exploring social identity in the information age
This seminar asks students to explore how they develop, maintain, and assert a sense of themselves through ongoing interactions. This course will rely on course readings, active discussion, and a collective interview project to evoke questions about who we are - and are able to be - in an increasingly technologically mediated social environment. This seminar is intended to generate understandings of the origins of symbolic interactionist, social identity, and social constructivist theories of the self, and inspire questions about how these perspectives translate into the current era of pervasive communication and information saturation (graduate).