News Category: awards-&-honors

Jacek Gwizdka, Assistant Professor in the School of Information and co-Director of the Information eXperience Lab at University of Texas at Austin, and Dania Bilal, a Professor in the iSchool of Information Sciences at University of Tennessee, and have received a $41,363 Google Research Award for a project titled "Child-friendly search engine results pages (SERPs): Towards better understanding of Google search results readability by children." In this project, Drs. Bilal and Gwizdka will investigate how children read and assess the reading levels of Google's search results pages (SERPs).

The School of Information's Master of Science in Information Studies program received notice of re-accreditation from the American Library Association. The decision was based on the Program Presentation, the External Review Panel Report, all of the reports the program submitted since the last comprehensive review, and the the June 28th meeting with the dean and chair of the ERP. The next comprehensive review visit is scheduled for Spring 2021.

Some educators at a White House gathering said they were hesitant at first to bring new technology into their classrooms. Austin's Eanes school district librarian Carolyn Foote said her attitude has always been, "Why not?" Foote said the "aha moment" where she understood the importance of iPads was while working with a disabled student. He didn't have the fine motor skills to turn the pages of books, but he could flip through pages on an iPad. It gave the student a level of independence he never had before, and Foote wanted to share that independence with all students.

AUSTIN, TX - The School of Information student chapter of ASIS&T's subcommittee AWIT was awarded the NCWIT Student Seed Fund Grant for $1,0000. AWIT will use the grant to hold an iSchool Showcase mini-conference in spring of 2014.