World of Warcraft rapidly became the most popular online world game on the planet, amassing 11.5 million subscribers--officially making it an online community of gamers that had more inhabitants than the state of Ohio and was almost twice as populous as Scotland. It's a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO in gamer jargon, where each person controls a single character inside a virtual world, interacting with other people's characters and computer-controlled monsters, quest-givers, and merchants.

In My Life as a Night Elf Priest, Bonnie Nardi, a well-known ethnographer who has published extensively on how theories of what we do intersect with how we adopt and use technology, compiles more than three years of participatory research in Warcraft play and culture in the United States and China into this field study of player behavior and activity. She introduces us to her research strategy and the history, structure, and culture of Warcraft; argues for applying activity theory and theories of aesthetic experience to the study of gaming and play; and educates us on issues of gender, culture, and addiction as part of the play experience. Nardi paints a compelling portrait of what drives online gamers both in this country and in China, where she spent a month studying players in Internet cafes.

Bonnie Nardi has given us a fresh look not only at World of Warcraft but at the field of game studies as a whole. One of the first in-depth studies of a game that has become an icon of digital culture, My Life as a Night Elf Priest will capture the interest of both the gamer and the ethnographer.

"Ever since the creators of the animated television show South Park turned their lovingly sardonic gaze on the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft for an entire episode, WoW's status as an icon of digital culture has been secure. My Life as a Night Elf Priest digs deep beneath the surface of that icon to explore the rich particulars of the World of Warcraft player's experience."
--Julian Dibbell, Wired

• The interrelationship of technology and identity in the context of IS implementation;
• The role of identity in enabling collaboration and coordination across groups and organizations;
• The relationship between identity, power and organizational politics;
• Information systems research issues created by the study of identity;
• Implementation, acceptance and ongoing challenges of access management;
• The role of organizational identity in enabling organizational sustainability;
• The influence of the presentation and perception of identity on information technology use;
• Public sector usage of identity technologies;
• Anonymity, pseudonymity, privacy and security concerns about technologies for identification.

"The desire for risk-taking and sexual exploration during the teenage years combined with a constant connection via mobile devices creates a 'perfect storm' for sexting," said Lenhart. "Teenagers have always grappled with issues around sex and relationships, but their coming-of-age mistakes and transgressions have never been so easily transmitted and archived for others to see."

There are two schools of thought about how to treat sexting and its more broadly defined cousin, cyber-bullying, which covers everything from hate e-mail to nasty MySpace postings. One is that it's a mistake to focus on the technology at issue, because the hype about it obscures the underlying, long-term trouble: Kids can be incredibly cruel to each other in all kinds of ways. The Internet and the cell phone are just their latest tools. The tactics for addressing cyber-bullying should be the same as the tactics for reducing bullying of all kinds: teach kids to empathize and make sure they have a trustworthy adult to talk to if trouble is brewing.

This makes sense to me. But it's also clear that e-mails and texts and social media have some traits of their own, as the writer Danah Boyd explains. The bar for becoming a cyber-bully, or even a cyber-bully's accomplice, is much lower than the bar for becoming an actual bully. To torment a girl with a nude photo via sexting, you don't have to Xerox her photo and pass it around, or yell a taunt in the cafeteria, or even whisper about it over the phone, explains Robert King, a psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center. You can just press one button and forward the message to lots of other kids. And then those kids, one more step removed from the human being at the center of the flaying, can catch the contagion and spread it.

In other words, it's both the social context <i>and</i> the physical properties of the technology that matter.

The tech press is full of people who want to tell you how completely awesome life is going to be when everything moves to "the cloud" - that is, when all your important storage, processing and other needs are handled by vast, professionally managed data-centres.

Here's something you won't see mentioned, though: the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy that cloud companies hope to leverage into fortunes.

I am seeking someone to conduct an NSF-funded interview study of scientific collaborations. This task will involve quite a bit of traveling to universities and talking with a variety of people including top scientists (half of whom will be CS, the other half a variety of disciplines), grad students, and staff including bureaucratic personnel such as people in budget offices. The task will also involve coding and analysis of the interviews.

If you are interested in virtual organization, the science of science, e-science, CSCW, and other related topics, you would have a chance to carve out your own paper from this work.

The postdoc would be for one year. It would not be necessary to live in Pittsburgh since the study is nationwide, however, would require you to visit periodically.

A survey of information technology innovations that changed society in fundamental ways, within the context of a more broadly defined discussion of the "history of technology."Topics within the history of information technology include the development of the integrated circuit, the personal computer, the Internet and the world wide Web, etc.Topics within the history of technology (broadly defined) include ethical, legal, environmental, and feminist issues involved in the development and implementation of new technologies.The course entails a combination of historical overview and a number of individual case studies of technology development and implementation.The latter will focus on issues of leadership, the identification and solution of complex problems, and the unexpected consequences of technological advances.

An introduction to object-oriented programming, with an emphasis on program design, problem solving, methodology, and algorithms. Students will master the fundamental concepts and structures common to programming.

An overview of the role of databases within a variety of academic, business, and governmental organizations, and an introduction to database design and management. Students will be required to create databases related to their major fields or areas of academic interest using both small business and enterprise-class database management systems.

In this article we offer visual depictions and analysis of contextual factors relative to the presence of public safety networks (PSNs) in the United States (US). A PSN combines shared technological infrastructures for supporting information sharing, computing interoperability and interagency interactions involving policing, criminal justice, and emergency response. The broad research objective is to explain the formation of PSNs based upon factors derived from rational choice and institutional theories. To do so we develop maps to represent our data analysis. This analysis suggests that our approach is promising for generating insights about PSNs and, by extension, about other types of inter-organizational collaborations focusing on using information and communication technologies to enable information-sharing.

• new forms of organizing (e.g., virtual organizations, massive online activities)
• social computing (e.g., online communities, social network sites)
• distributed work (e.g., collaboratories, virtual teams and organizations)
• new technologies (e.g., recommender systems, prediction markets, ubiquitous computing)
• novel forms of production (e.g., open source software, Wikipedia)
• new forms of expression and entertainment (e.g., blogs, wikis, massive multiplayer online role-playing games)
• information and communication technologies for developing regions (e.g., cell phone-based applications to assist economic development, infrastructure development for local economic action).