FEIS 2018 – International Symposium on the Future of Education in Information Science

Pisa, 10–11 September 2018

The final activity of the EINFOSE project was organized as an international conference: ‘FEIS 2018 – International Symposium on the Future of Education in Information Science’. The FEIS 2018 took place in Pisa, Italy, on September 10th and 11th, 2018 (URL: http://einfose.ffos.hr/feis-2018/proceedings).

European Information Science Education: Encouraging Mobility and Learning Outcomes Harmonization (EINFOSE) was an Erasmus+ funded project which started on October 1st, 2016 and ended on September 30th, 2018. The project partners were university teachers from eight European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs): Hoegskolan i Boras, Sweden; Stiftung Universität Hildesheim, Germany; Universität Graz, Austria; Univerza v Ljubljani, Slovenia; Universitá di Pisa, Italia; Universitat de Barcelona, Spain; Hacettepe Universitezi, Turkey and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of the University of Osijek. The latter being the main coordinator of the project. The aim of this project was to overcome differences that exist in the area of entry requirements and learning outcomes in the field of Information Science (IS). To reach this goal several dissemination activities were organized in order to present one of five intellectual outcomes (IOs) of the project. The fifth of these IOs, which dealt with the Policy Recommendations on Entry Requirements and Learning Outcomes Harmonization, was the focus of FEIS 2018 as the project team wanted to include a wider academic and professional audience in the discussion about the state-of-the-art and future of (L)IS education at HEIs.

Four top-level Keynote Speakers were invited to offer their views and exchange experiences: Prof. David Bawden (City, University of London, UK), Prof. Leif Kajberg (retired from Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark), Prof. Gary Marchionini (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA), and Prof. Anna Maria Tammaro (University of Parma, Italy).

The final program of FEIS 2018 was comprised of the EINFOSE project presentation by the EINFOSE coordinator; a presentation of the EINFOSE Policy Recommendations and a general discussion with the audience; talks by four invited keynote speakers and a panel entitled ‘In search of a balance among human, technology and information dimensions in creating a new curriculum’. The panel moderator was Javed Mostafa (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology – ASIS&T). Panelists were Gary Marchionini (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA), Fidelia Ibekwe SanJuan (University of Aix-Marseille, France), David Bawden (City, University of London, UK), Sanda Erdelez (Simmons College, USA), and Tatjana Aparac-JeluÅ¡ić (EINFOSE coordinator, University of Osijek, Croatia).

There were 18 oral presentations of accepted papers, 8 poster presentations of accepted posters and 7 poster presentations of EINFOSE partners on their Information Science Study Programs.

There were 93 registered participants to FEIS 2018, plus 10–15 other people listening to only a few sessions (e.g. panels), which made a total of more than 100 participants. There were 25 students, 10 of whom had scholarships. Regarding the nationality of participants, there were 38 Italian, of whom 27 from Pisa and 11 from other cities; 10 Croatian, 9 German, 6 American, 3 Swedish, 3 Spanish, 3 Russian, and the remaining 21 participants were from France, Lithuania, Austria, Bulgaria, Poland, Norway, Bosnia, The UK, Canada and Australia. In this sense, FEIS 2018 was a truly international event.

The event was videotaped by the University of Pisa Media Event Unit. The post-produced video is publicly available at http://mediaeventi.unipi.it.

Tatjana Aparac-Jelušić

EINFOSE Project Coordinator