Introduction to Teaching and Learning in Information Retrieval

For a number of years, the editors of this volume have attempted to provide a higher profile for teaching and learning as applied to information retrieval (IR), either by organizing workshops such as the Teaching and Learning in IR workshops run in 2007 (Huete et al. 2007) and 2008 (MacFarlane et al. 2008), or editing special issues on the subject in learned journals (Fernández-Luna et al. 2009b). This book continues this effort and addresses a number of significant issues in the discipline, which had been identified either by us or by colleagues who have written papers to be presented at the workshops we organized or published in journals. It was felt by us, when first starting out this journey, that insufficient attention was given to an important aspect of academics’ lives – teaching. There has been very little work done on pedagogical research in IR, apart from the notable effort of Edward Fox and colleagues to address the issue of what should be in the curricula for various types of students at the tertiary level – undergraduate, masters, and Ph.D. (Fox 1996). The objective of this book is to provide ideas and practical experience of teaching and learning for IR, for those whose job requires them to teach in one form or another, and delivering IR courses is a major part of their working lives. In doing this we hope to share best practice and encourage the dissemination of ideas which are known to work well with real students, and in doing so provide a better profile for the field as a whole. We also where necessary tackle the theoretical ideas in teaching and learning which need to be addressed by any practitioner.