LIS 875: Foundations of Technology for Information Science

This course is intended as an introduction to technologies commonly used by information scientists. Really, this is a computer programming course, designed for students who will not become professional programmers but who will need to use technical skills or interact with programmers. That is, the course helps students understand how to think about programming computers, and builds some basic skills at getting computers to do what they want them to do, without an expectation that they go on to take large numbers of future programming courses or work professionally doing programming.

Everyone can learn to program. Everyone. And understanding more about how computers work, how programmers work, and what is easy vs hard for computers are extremely useful skills. Those skills are valuable for people doing analytics, graphic design work, creating user experiences, building games, and almost anyone who works with computers as part of their job. This course tries to help students build computer programming skills that they can immediately apply to interesting problems and use in their other endeavors.

Class meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11:00am-12:15pm in Morgridge Hall room 2516

If you have questions, please feel free to email any of the teaching team:

• Professor Rick Wash rwash@wisc.edu
• TA Aloukika Shrestha shrestha32@wisc.edu