SLIS Student News

The Rob Kling Social Informatics Fellowship honors Professor Rob Kling's many contributions to social informatics education. The Fellowship is awarded annually, in consultation with Mitzi Lewison, Kling's wife, to a social informatics student enrolled in the doctoral program of the School of Library and Information Science. It is a great pleasure to announce that Christina Courtright is the 2004 recipient of this award.

For more than twenty years, until his untimely passing in May 2003, Kling was a tireless and passionate advocate for a new perspective on how computers were transforming social, political, and organizational life. His prodigious corpus of research is an extended exploration of the character of information and communication technologies (ICTs). He provided us with the conceptual underpinnings that illuminate the complex and contextually embedded nature of socio-technical networks and the interactions between ICTs and social structures that shape how people use technology. His empirically-based investigations examine work life in many different organizational settings: electronic publishing, digital libraries, professional communities, and scientific collaboration.

Kling was among the first to recognize the political character of computerization. He wrote extensively about value conflicts and social choices, advocated that social values be incorporated in the design of computer-based information systems, and lobbied for changes in public policy. In addition to his scholarly work, he wrote textbooks to introduce students to social informatics and published articles on the challenges of teaching the social uses of computing. Kling's greatest legacy is to the generations of students he introduced to social informatics, those whom he inspired, nurtured, mentored, collaborated with, and to whom he communicated his deep engagement with intellectual life and the world and his commitment to an ethical and moral life.

Christina Courtright was a student and collaborator of Rob Kling. Like Kling, she brings a passionate commitment to social informatics and to education; she shares his enthusiasm for the intellectual life of the academy, boundless energy and curiosity, openness to new ideas, and wide-ranging interdisciplinary interests. She has received the John H. Edwards and Chancellor's Fellowships and was named a Chancellor's Scholar. Her publications include journal articles, book chapters, book reviews and presentations on information and communication technologies, social and information inequality, learning in electronic forums (with Rob Kling), information policy, and information infrastructure development in international perspective. She is book review editor for The Information Society journal.

Like Kling, she is committed to teaching and serves as a role model for her students, enthusiastically communicating her love for critical thinking and learning. Like Kling, her social and political activism brings theory into practice. She has been a member of the SLIS Curriculum Steering Committee and coordinator of the Doctoral Students' Association, and has also coordinated activities among doctoral students campus-wide to promote interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and research in social informatics. She assists Latin American immigrants who have settled in Bloomington and provides technical assistance for building community Internet centers in El Salvador. Her professional affiliations include Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Library and Information Science Education, Association of Internet Researchers, and the Indiana University Center for Social Informatics.

Posted May 19, 2004