TLIR'08

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Second International Workshop on Teaching and
Learning of Information Retrieval (TLIR'08)
Saturday, October 18, 2008

Justification, goals and summary of the workshop

Information Retrieval (IR) is a research area that has generated a great deal of interest in recent years, largely due to the growth of the Internet. Many different problems that have arisen during this time have been tackled by the efforts of thousand of researchers around the world. New advances are spread following the usual scientific channels, i.e. journals and conferences, keeping researchers abreast of new developments in the field.

However we need to ensure that students who study the subject of IR understand the basis of this discipline, not just with the aim of conducting research in the future for example, but also as a way of learning how search engines work - tools that they use for their own benefit on a daily basis. IR is a very useful subject to reinforce the knowledge acquired in other fields, such as programming, data structures, user interface design etc. Postgraduate students who may conduct research in this area also need to know the fundamental aspects of the subject, simply because they may be building new solutions for them.

Therefore as important as research is to IR, one way to improve the profile of the subject is to create a common space where IR lecturers and researchers can share their experiences and opinions in the field of IR teaching at any of the educational levels (primary, secondary and tertiary). The aim of the workshop is to provide this common space.

The first edition of the workshop was held in January 10th, 2007, under the auspices of the BCS-IRSG at the BSC Headquarters in London. The proceedings were published by the BCS 'Electronic Workshops in Computing' (eWIC). We have designed this workshop to provide an event which will strengthen the community, attracting both young and experienced lecturers, who will be encouraged to present their experiences and ideas, obtaining a valuable feedback from an audience with the same interests.

We have a number of broad topics to which we invite position papers on, and will then take the issues to a couple of break out sessions. The breakout sessions will develop positions based on the core questions raised by the position papers. We intend to publish a white paper on our findings from these session, and feedback the issue to the academic community. The outcome therefore is not a set of papers which discuss pedagogical research in the area, but a set of recommendations to those who teach IR on how to improve delivery and quality on their courses, from several perspectives – academic, professional body and commercial.
Topics

The scope of this workshop will be all the experiences teaching IR. Possible topics are listed under the following categories.

Level 1

[A] Technical Level (Non-technical Mid-way to Technical continuum)
[B] Educational Goals

[b1] Library and information Science
[b2] Computer Science
[b3] MIS
[b3] Linguistics


Level 2

[1] Teaching and Learning methods:

[1a] classroom;
[1b] elearning (distance learning);

[2] Assessment and feedback
[3] Curricula.

We invite papers on position papers on IR teaching, theoretical or position papers on any of some of the areas mentioned above. For all the areas we identify we will provide a broad overview of them, and a list off issues which will be discussed further in breakout sessions.
Important Dates

* Deadline for paper submission: 15th September 2008.
* Notification of Acceptance: 29th September 2008.
* Camera ready: 6th October 2008.

Submissions

Details of how to submit papers will be confirmed soon.
The workshop will be held at Information Interaction in Context IIiX 2008 .

Workshop Organisers

• - Andrew MacFarlane (andym@soi.city.ac.uk), Department of Information Science. City University. London - United Kingdom.
• - Juan F. Huete (jhg@decsai.ugr.es), Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación e Inteligencia Artificial. Universidad de Granada - Spain.
• - Juan M. Fernández-Luna (jmfluna@decsai.ugr.es), Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación e Inteligencia Artificial. Universidad de Granada - Spain.
• - Efthimis N. Efthimiadis, The information School, University of Washington, Seattle, U.S.A.