PRESS RELEASE -

Oxford University Teaching Awards for OII Faculty

We are extremely pleased to announce that three members of the OII teaching faculty are to receive awards from the University of Oxford, in recognition of their excellent contributions to the department’s teaching over the past year. They will receive the awards at a presentation ceremony hosted by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Andrew Hamilton, on 10 November 2011. Only four Individual Teaching Awards have been made in the Social Science Division, of which the OII have received half (Greg Taylor and Bernie Hogan).

The following OII faculty will receive awards:

• Dr Greg Taylor, in the light of his success in designing and delivering our most taxing MSc option paper – Internet Economics – which has also received the greatest praise from students taking the course. The course provides a general introduction to the economics of the Internet, and to economics as a tool for social research more generally, emphasising issues such as competition, asymmetric information, trust and privacy, auctions, and network economics.
• Dr Bernie Hogan, for his role in developing two of the OII’s most innovative MSc courses: “Online Social Networks” (developed with Dr Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon) and “Digital Social Research“. Online Social Networks is an introduction to the analysis of online social networks, providing students with the tools necessary to undertake research on online networks, and to give an overview of the type of questions that these data can answer. Digital Social Research familiarizes students with a variety of methods for capturing online data in a host of formats, and techniques for answering research questions based on data from the web.
• Dr Victoria Nash, for initiating the OII Virtual Open Day, developed with Professor Ralph Schroeder and OII support staff, and first held in December 2010. This made use of live webstreaming to present the department to prospective students watching online, as well as to introduce the MSc and DPhil programmes and explain the admissions procedures. It also included a live question and answer session, with questions being taken live from those watching from all over the world. The OII Virtual Open Day has already won an award for “Use of Technology for Impact and Outreach” from OxTALENT, a group aiming to stimulate use of IT in teaching and learning across the University of Oxford.

OII Director Professor Helen Margetts said: “Many OII faculty are highly innovative in the development and delivery of field-leading courses and it is marvellous to see their contributions receive such commendation from the University”.

The Oxford Internet Institute is a world-leading centre for research and study of the Internet and its social implications, and the only major department in a top-ranking international university to offer multi-disciplinary social science degree programmes focusing on the Internet.

Our extremely competitive one-year MSc in Social Science of the Internet is a full-time intensively taught Masters course, with a core syllabus designed to ensure that all students attain an in-depth understanding of the social science concepts, theories and methods required to undertake and assess rigorous empirical research or policy analysis of Internet-related issues.

Our DPhil in Information, Communication and the Social Sciences trains excellent researchers to be future leaders in Internet scholarship, combining high-quality supervision from field-leading academics with tailored training in research methods and graduate skills, specifically designed to facilitate innovative and rigorous study in this fast-moving field.