Facebook, Google, MySpace analyzed in new class looking at Internet information

A new class, "The Individual in the Information Age," is being offered for the spring semester from the School of Library and Information Science for all undergraduates.\nSLIS Ph.D. student Wayne Buente will teach L416, which he said will focus on the controversies of social networking Web sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Google and Flickr.\n"I was trying to think of a class that would be relevant to a college student and how they get information," Buente said. "I wanted to offer a class that looks at the Information Age that is different from other courses being offered."\nThe first part of the semester will center on the "living Web," a phrase Buente adopted from Newsweek, and will deal with Web 2.0 applications. The second part of the course will concentrate on analyzing information search engines, such as Google, in a critical way.\n"This course is designed for any major. Everyone across the board uses the Web now," said Rhonda Spencer, director of admissions and placement for SLIS.\nShe said this class is being added now in part to help with some of the changes being faced with information issues and that "information will just make people stronger."\n"There are no jobs where technology is not used," said Alice Robbin, an associate professor at SLIS. "Knowing how it benefits is useful for everyone."\nBuente said he hopes students will take away from the course an understanding of information and how it relates to their lives. Knowing that they will be able to view technology with a critical eye after taking the class is important to him.\n"There is a viewpoint that technology is first, but we sometimes forget about people," he said. "We put a lot of belief in technology, but the way some people use it is not planned."\nSpencer said after taking this class students should be able to evaluate Web sites they use every day and analyze trends and the future of social informatics.\n"This course is on the frontier of what we are going to be doing with the next generation of Web application. It is going to focus on information content and managing that content," Robbin said. "This course gets us there"