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Teaching IR: Curricular Considerations

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Teaching and Learning in Information Retrieval

Part of the book series: The Information Retrieval Series ((INRE,volume 31))

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Abstract

Information retrieval (IR) is nowadays accepted as an important topic in various disciplines. Information science, computer science, information systems, and library science are obvious candidates. But also in disciplines such as marketing, bioinformatics, or linguistics, IR topics are considered important and should be covered by respective curricula. For those who are teaching IR topics, this brings up serious questions: Which topics should be addressed in an IR course? Can one course serve the different target groups? What would be an appropriate set of IR courses to satisfy all potentially interested parties?

In this chapter, we try to provide a landscape giving hints with respect to the topics relevant for the different target groups. In fact, a single IR course will hardly satisfy the needs of all target groups. A coordinated set of smaller IR courses where each group can select an appropriate subset might be a solution. Another important aspect is practical exercises. An IR course has to integrate such exercises, and a huge variety of available tools and frameworks are useful in this respect. This chapter will exemplarily consider some of these tools and discuss their use in IR courses.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://trec.nist.gov/, last accessed: 2010-10-26.

  2. 2.

    http://www.clef-campaign.org/, last accessed: 2010-10-26.

  3. 3.

    http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/, last accessed: 2010-10-26.

  4. 4.

    See, e.g. http://news.google.com/, last accessed: 2010-10-26.

  5. 5.

    http://www.inex.otago.ac.nz/about.html, last accessed: 2010-10-26.

  6. 6.

    Middleton and Baeza-Yates (2007) give an overview and compare multiple search engine libraries. A list of links pointing to tools and libraries can also be found in the Teaching IRsubtree on the web site of FG-IR (http://www.fg-ir.de, last accessed: 2010-10-26).

  7. 7.

    http://lucene.apache.org/, last accessed: 2010-10-26.

  8. 8.

    http://code.google.com/p/luke/, last accessed: 2010-10-26.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany

    Daniel Blank & Andreas Henrich

  2. University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg-Essen, Germany

    Norbert Fuhr

  3. University of Hildesheim, Hildesheim, Germany

    Thomas Mandl

  4. Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

    Thomas Rölleke

  5. University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

    Hinrich Schütze

  6. Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar, Weimar, Germany

    Benno Stein

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Correspondence to Daniel Blank .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, Seattle, 98195-2840, Washington, USA

    Efthimis Efthimiadis

  2. , Departamento de Ciencias de la, Universidad de Granada, C/ Periodista Daniel Saucedo Aranda, s/n., Granada, 18071, Spain

    Juan M. Fernández-Luna

  3. , Departamento de Ciencias de la, Universidad de Granada, C/ Periodista Daniel Saucedo Aranda, s/n., Granada, 18071, Spain

    Juan F. Huete

  4. , Department of Information Science, City University London, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB, United Kingdom

    Andrew MacFarlane

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Blank, D. et al. (2011). Teaching IR: Curricular Considerations. In: Efthimiadis, E., Fernández-Luna, J., Huete, J., MacFarlane, A. (eds) Teaching and Learning in Information Retrieval. The Information Retrieval Series, vol 31. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22511-6_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22511-6_3

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