Michael S. Nilan

Michael Nilan - Curriculum Vitae
Fall 2009 Office Hours
Tuesdays and Thursdays
11 a.m. to noon, or by appointment


Mike is a researcher and lecturer on user-based information system design and cognitive information seeking and information use behaviors. His current efforts are directed towards the development and maintenance of "virtual communities" using the World Wide Web as a medium to organize resources for collaborative work according to temporal and spatial analysis of patterns in users' perceived problem structures. 

These virtual communities are similar to the emerging "virtual private networks" and functional "portals" but are structured according to how users see and talk about their work. The World Wide Web represents a communication medium that enables communication and collaboration possibilities that go well beyond face-to-face communication. 

As bandwidth and network speeds increase, the organization of information/data, computing functionalities (i.e., what computers do), and communication links can become much more accessible to users. These virtual communities are conceptualized as operating within a larger knowledge management context where the coherent organization of resources provides the basis for the use of knowledge created from past problem solving episodes for current problem solving. 

As the distinctions between the role of designer and the role of user become merged through the inexpensive and technically more simple WWW design capability, defining the web as a collaborative environment makes more sense. Mike is involved in several projects which are focused on understanding the perceptions of virtual community members associated with WWW-based communication sites. One research project in which he is currently engaged is a user-based interaction design approach that employs end-user understandings of processes as the starting point for system design.