iSchool offers new course on social Web technologies

The Syracuse School of Information Studies (iSchool) will offer a new course during the Fall 2010 semester on social Web technologies. The course, “Social Web Technologies” (IST 400/600), will be taught by adjunct professor Keisuke Inoue on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:30-4:50 p.m.

The Social Web Technologies course is designed to train students to design, implement, employ and manage the information systems that use social Web technologies. The phrase “social Web technologies” refers to the collection of technologies that are powering today’s interactive Web interfaces, like the product reviews and recommender systems of Amazon, Netfilx and eBay. Social Web technologies also assist the functionality of search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing, and social tagging/social media applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.

“I like to incorporate hands-on activities in my courses, so students will actually implement these technologies in a project based on services offered by businesses today,” Inoue says. “My hope is that students learn about the technologies that enable Web 2.0 businesses and social networking sites to function.”

The new course will focus on the following technologies:
• Web application frameworks
• database technologies
• content management / information organization
• data mining / machine learning algorithms
• network-based algorithms
• artificial intelligence programming

This class will serve as a gateway to these technologies for students who are new to them. For students who have already learned one of the technologies above, the class will position each piece of the technologies within the broader perspective of social Web technologies.

Prerequisites for this class are “Application Programming for Information Systems” (IST 256) or previous programming experience.

For more information about this course, contact Inoue at kinoue@syr.edu.