Amy J. Warner, Associate Professor,
Jean Chung and Jason P. Williams
School of Information
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Brian D. Athey
Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology
University of Michigan Medical Center
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Experiential Learning in a Specific Application:
The Applications Area Component
at the University of Michigan

JURIED PAPER SESSION, Wednesday, February 12, 1997, 4:00pm - 5:30pm

This paper will describe our experiences with developing classroom and experiential learning components for School of Information (SI) students, in which they are applying their knowledge and expertise about information system organization and development to specific applications domains. Our paper will be divided into two sections. The first part will describe the philosophy behind our development of additional coursework and projects which allow students to apply principles and methods learned in the core and electives at SI to specific real-world contexts. The second part will describe our first experience with this approach in the specific applications domain of medical informatics--an area to which SI students can make meaningful contributions.

The general framework of the new curriculum being implemented at the School of Information (SI) consists of core courses taken by all incoming students and then by students electing one of our new specializations, followed by a rich set of electives which further ground students in the theory, principles and practices of these specializations. In addition, the vision is to create a further set of experiences in which students can then apply the knowledge gained in the core and specializations to specific real-world domains--this is the notion of the applications area. Our paper will describe the motivation behind and methods used to arrive at this separation in the curriculum of theory, principles, concepts, and practices of a given specialization from their actual application in real-world situations. It will also discuss the basic issues we faced in making this division explicit, including the impact on a curriculum which has traditionally woven theory, practice and context together; the needs within the applications domain for specific expertise among the students electing the coursework; and the greater emphasis on teamwork and group projects necessary within this curriculum component in order to make the genuine application of theory and practice explicit.

We have to date explored the notion of the applications area by working on a project which is building a curriculum component with these characteristics in the area of medical informatics. Medical informatics is the application of the intellectual and technical concepts and methods of information systems development, use and evaluation to solve problems and aid in decision-making in medicine. We will describe our experiences in piloting an experiential learning component with two SI students, who participated with us in developing a digital information space for biomedical researchers at the University of Michigan. We will also describe our experiences with them in further developing a specific system for organizing and browsing images of the inner ear. We will describe how we then used what we learned in this effort as the basis for a course, offered Fall 1996, in which we use the general methods and framework from the pilot inner ear project to develop similar systems for other anatomical areas. In this section our paper will emphasize the philosophy of this experience, which is to require students to apply their knowledge of technology, database design, and subject access to develop a personal image browsing and retrieval system for a faculty member in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology. We will also describe what we have learned to date and what we plan for the future, both for the medical area, as well as for others, such as law and various type of library contexts.

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