A syllabus defines the contents of a course, as well as other information such as resources and assignments. In this paper, we report on our work towards creating a syllabus repository of Computer Science courses across universities in the USA. We present some statistics from our initial collection of 8000+ syllabi. We show a syllabus creator that is integrated with Moodle [5], an opensource course management system, which allows for the creation of a syllabus for a particular course. Among other information, it includes knowledge units from the Computing Curricula 2001 body of knowledge. The goal of the syllabus repository is to provide added value to the Computer Science Education community, and we present some such offerings. We conclude by presenting our future plans for the syllabus repository. These include using automated techniques to collect and classify syllabi, providing recommendations to instructors when creating a syllabus, and allowing the community to share their syllabi automatically. The syllabus collection will be part of the Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library (CITIDEL), a collection of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL).

Knowledge workers increasingly use multiple devices such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones, and PDAs for personal information management (PIM) tasks. The use of several of these devices together creates higher task difficulty for users than when used individually (as reported in a recent survey we conducted). Prompted by this, we are conducting an experiment to study mental workload in multi-device scenarios. While mental workload has been shown to decrease at sub-task boundaries, it has not been studied if this still holds for sub-tasks performed on different devices. We hypothesize that the level of support provided by the system for task migration affects mental workload. Mental workload measurements can enable designers to isolate critical sub-tasks and redesign or optimize the user experience selectively. In addition, we believe that mental workload shows promise as a cross-tool, cross-task method of evaluating PIM tools, services and strategies, thus fulfilling a need expressed by several researchers in the area of personal information management. In this paper, we describe our ongoing experiment of measuring mental workload (via physiological as well as subjective measures) and its implications for users, designers and researchers in PIM.

Syllabi are important educational resources. Gathering syllabi that are freely available and creating useful services on top of the collection presents great value for the educational community. However, searching for a syllabus on the Web using a generic search engine is an error-prone process and often yields too many irrelevant links. In this chapter, we describe our empirical study on automatic syllabus classification using support vector machines (SVM) to filter noise out from search results. We describe various steps in the classification process from training data preparation, feature selection, and classifier building using SVMs. Empirical results are provided and discussed. We hope our reported work will also benefit people who are interested in building other genre-specific repositories.

A syllabus defines the contents of a course, as well as other information such as resources and assignments. In this paper, we report on our work towards creating a syllabus repository of Computer Science courses across universities in the USA. We present some statistics from our initial collection of 8000+ syllabi. We show a syllabus creator that is integrated with Moodle [5], an opensource course management system, which allows for the creation of a syllabus for a particular course. Among other information, it includes knowledge units from the Computing Curricula 2001 body of knowledge. The goal of the syllabus repository is to provide added value to the Computer Science Education community, and we present some such offerings. We conclude by presenting our future plans for the syllabus repository. These include using automated techniques to collect and classify syllabi, providing recommendations to instructors when creating a syllabus, and allowing the community to share their syllabi automatically. The syllabus collection will be part of the Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library (CITIDEL), a collection of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL).

Abstract. Information is being disseminated much faster than we can assimilate it, leading to information overload. In addition to desktop computers, users use a vast array of other devices to manage their information, which leads to information fragmentation. It has not yet been studied how users adapt their information management practices in response to the introduction of new devices into their personal information ecosystem. As part of my doctoral research, I plan to study this evolution, which is important for the design of next-generation devices and to establish future research directions in personal information management.