Professor Emeritus Chip Bruce has authored a new book that examines the future of education. In Beyond the Classroom Walls: Imagining the Future of Education, from Community Schools to Communiversities, which was recently published by Rowman & Littlefield, he asks readers to adopt "a critical and comprehensive view of education" that transcends the classroom. According to Bruce, our educational systems are organized in ways that complicate the integration of online learning, schools, and learning through work.

As the calls for banning books in schools and libraries have increased exponentially in recent years, so have the requests for scholarly responses from Associate Professor Emily Knox, who has focused her career on studying intellectual freedom, information access and ethics, and book banning.

A paper coauthored by PhD student Lanyu Shang and members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, received the best paper award in the research track during the 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2022).

Each year, the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab hosts thousands of diverse visitors, prompting makers, educators, and researchers across campus and local communities to collaborate as they share the vision of inspiring creativity and discovery through dynamic learning.

Members of Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, will present their research at the 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022), which will be held from November 29-December 1 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and also virtually. NeurIPS is one of the most prestigious and competitive international conferences in machine learning and computational neuroscience.  

Professor Emeritus Dan Schiller has authored a new book on the progression of telecommunications systems in the United States. In Crossed Wires: The Conflicted History of U.S. Telecommunications from the Post Office to the Internet, which will be released by Oxford University Press in February 2023, Schiller draws on archival documents to argue that it was not technology but political economy that drove the evolution of the telecommunications industry.

J. Stephen Downie, iSchool professor and co-director of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), and Glen Layne-Worthey, associate director for HTRC Research Support Services, along with partners in the University of Illinois Library, have been awarded $17,456 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Office of Digital Humanities. The team will contribute to the University of Kansas project, "Building Literacy and Curating (Critical Cultural) Knowledge in Digital Humanities (BLACK DH)."

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 25th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2022) and the 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2022). 

Catherine Blake, professor in the School of Information Sciences and Health Innovation Professor in the Carle College of Medicine, has been named a fellow in the fourth cohort of the IAspire Leadership Academy, a leadership program aimed at helping STEM faculty from underrepresented backgrounds ascend to leadership roles at colleges and universities. The academy is part of the Aspire Alliance's Institutional Change Initiative, led by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the University of Georgia.

Librarians need to be able to communicate about social justice issues, and teaching social justice storytelling to library school students will help them develop the skills to do so, two researchers say. Associate Professor Kate McDowell and Nicole Cooke, a former Illinois information sciences professor who now teaches at the University of South Carolina, analyzed how to teach those skills through a storytelling assignment with their students.