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From email, 9/18/2006, from Stephen Davies

Here's my latest attempt to keep up with this rapidly evolving thread...

I may be getting further off in the weeds from the rest of you guys, but as long as we're still in the brainstorming stage, I'll keep throwing my ideas into the mix.

One of my former advisors and mentors from CU was in town last night, so I drove up to D.C. to meet him, and we had a long discussion about our second major/track thoughts. In discussing it with him, I realize that I've been using some terms incorrectly, and that has led to some confusion about exactly what it is that I'm proposing. In particular, I misunderstood the common usage of the two terms "information systems" and "information science," and a third term, "informatics." Jennifer and others are correct in stating that "information systems" is essentially a business-centric endeavor, and might be thought of as a hybrid between business and CS. My fault for not using the terms precisely; I thought that "information systems" was distinct from "management information systems," but evidently MIS, CIS, and IS are often all used interchangeably. And if we were to offer a major/track under that name, I think we *would* need to include accounting, etc., in the curriculum.

Now it turns out that what I have been trying to argue for all along does in fact have a name (or rather, two names), those names being "information science" and "informatics." Wikipedia is useful here; read the first couple of paragraphs of these pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics

Clearly the meanings of all these terms are in flux (even Wikipedia's definition of "Information Systems" sounds a lot closer to what I was proposing than what most people seem to mean by the term) so we can't be too dogmatic here. But this gives the flavor of what I've been advocating: studying information for its own sake, rather than studying computers and technology for its own sake.

Clayton (my mentor) recommended looking at Indiana's informatics program, and it turns out that this is indeed very close to what I'm envisioning. Check out these brief links:

http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/overview/what_is_informatics.asp http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/overview/faq.asp#f3 http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/academics/undergrad.asp

Note that they also have a CS degree (and department), which is separate (but with some overlap) from the IS degree (and department.)

Now we obviously don't have nearly the resources to do anything this ambitious. Why, their entire freshman/sophomore curriculum is different between the two degrees, necessitating all new courses, and of course that's not realistic. But I believe there is enough overlap in subject matter between the two that we could offer something very cool that excited students who liked technology and applications, but weren't interested in taking as much math, as much theory, and as much under-the-hood stuff like architecture, OS, etc.

Notice the strong interdisciplinary flavor, as well. Students complete their "core," and then are required to choose one of 17 "cognate areas," which focuses on a particular discipline and allows the students to apply informatics to that domain. (One of these, but only one, is business.) This seems to me very cutting-edge and cool, and could easily lead to a number of collaborative projects with students and faculty in other departments! Just the kind of thing that the new president is looking for?