In this paper we present our experience in building and lecturing an interdisciplinary CS course aimed at teaching the Unified Modeling Language (UML) in a cultural context. Combining modeling concepts and ideas brought from philosophy and history of ideas we present a novel way to teach UML and modeling beyond its original environment. Course design, implementation and results are presented. Although the course was very experimental results were quite positive.

This paper presents a course that explores the borders of database systems and their relations with the philosophical movement of phenomenology, all framed in a humanistic informatics context.

The University of Alcalá (Spain) and the Lund University (Sweden) have been collaborating for several years in the development of various courses at the in-between of the Computer Science and the Humanities fields. We are trying to join different expertise and to apply it to design new ways of teaching. Within this scope we present here a course that is aimed to teach the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to humanities students.

An axiom of every good investor is not to buy shares when the goodness of them is already into newspapers. Before, the information was circulating in some form, for example from mouth-to-mouth, closed circles, or newsletters. Nowadays the news can also occur in blogs that point to public or private communities that discuss topics that traditional media do not carry or even hide. Nowadays, standard communication media are trapped in a Cartesian or Platonic correspondence assumption. They want to tell us how things really are, how they have occurred, and how they will happen, disregarding a concrete world of problems where opportunities and threats live in real time for people. Searching and exploring the world of blogs can create an acceleration of innovation and a dissolution of the previous status quo. Here, the search unit is not a word, but actions, worries, opportunities, threats, etc. That is, people living and pursuing shared goals with others. Which new searching tools can help to find trends, innovations and ideas taking consciousness in the context described above? Can IR help to end with this illusion of pseudo-objectivity and manipulation of passive individuals.

This paper describes ActionWorkflowTM approach to workflow management technology: a design methodology and associated computer software for the support of work in organizations. The approach is based on theories of communicative activity as language faction and has been developed in a series of systems for coordination among users of networked computers. This paper describes the approach, gives an example of its application, and shows the architecture of a workflow management system based on it.

The goal of this paper is to relate theory to invention and application in the design of systems for organizational communication and management. We propose and illustrate a theory of design, technology, and action that we believe has been missing in the mainstream of work on office systems. At the center of our thinking is a theory of language as social action, which differs from the generally taken-for-granted understandings of what goes on in an organization. This approach has been presented elsewhere, and our aim here is to examine its practical implications and assess its effectiveness in the design of The Coordinator, a workgroup productivity system that is in widespread commercial use on personal computers.