Shifting Contexts: Relating the User, Search and System in Teaching IR

Abstract

“Shifting contexts” explores the teaching and learning benefits in delivering a curriculum on the analysis of the retrieval system in the context of the user perspective of search. Three user contexts are identified to motivate student learning in relating IR practise and principles to the tasks of search, build or the design of a search and retrieval system and its interface. The complementary perspectives enable insight into our interactions with IR systems in characterising search, as well as search providing a context in which to explain the technology and the design of IR systems. The goal is to provide an education in the practise of IR and in the principles that underpin the discipline.