What happens when you give kids the opportunity to create their own smartphone apps? A developing interest in STEM, a boost in their critical thinking skills, and some really cool kid-created apps like "Jumpy Horses" and "Escape the World." Those two titles are among the apps being created at the Douglass Branch Library in Champaign in a free six-week program that gives children a chance to explore, play, and eventually create their own apps.

Several iSchool representatives will speak next week at Digital Humanities 2016, the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. The event will be held in Krakow, Poland on July 11-17.

A column by Associate Professor Bonnie Mak and Julia Pollack (MS ’12) appears in the July/August 2016 issue of the Association for Computing Machinery magazine, Interactions. In their column, “On the Design of the Humanities,” Mak and Pollack introduce the design of the humanities to audiences in human-computer interaction.

A recent analysis of online conversations about President Obama’s proposed plan for tuition-free community colleges, America's College Promise, indicates that a significant number of people oppose the plan.  iSchool doctoral student Shubhanshu Mishra and researchers examined the content and civility of comments that were posted on websites during the week following Obama's announcement.

Assistant Professor Emily Knox has been elected to a three-year term on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC). An alliance of more than fifty nonprofit organizations, NCAC promotes freedom of thought, inquiry, and expression and opposes censorship in all its forms.  

Doctoral candidate Shameem Ahmed successfully defended his dissertation, "mHealth Literacy: Characterizing People’s Ability to Use Smartphone-based Health-related Applications," on June 30.

Doctoral candidate Melissa Villa-Nicholas successfully defended her dissertation, "Latinas in Telecommunications: Intersectional Experiences in the Bell System," on June 30.

Around the world, the ubiquity of social media is growing, but its effects remain to be fully understood. Alumnus Anatoliy Gruzd (@gruzd) explores the impacts of social media on modern life, from interpersonal communication to the formation of political structures, in his research.

The Library School Alumni Association (LSAA) has announced the 2016 recipients of its annual awards. The recipients were recognized on June 26 at the LSAA Annual Meeting and reception held at the annual meeting of the American Library Association in Orlando.

Several members of the iSchool community will give presentations at the 2016 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School (DHOxSS) on July 4-8 at the University of Oxford. Attendees will follow one of eight workshop tracks throughout the week, and attend several additional lectures and a poster session.