 |
Huub MeijersSenior Researcher at UNU-MERIT, United Nations University & Maastricht University postal address: |
|
Last update: |
Infonomics: The Economics of the Digital AgeAre you fascinated by new information technologies and how they affect market structures? Do you appreciate the importance of information in the knowledge society? Do you want to find out how information and economics can complement each other in the business world? Then read on. Why should you choose Infonomics? Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are developing rapidly and companies often do not know how to deal with them. Infonomics is one of the few programmes in the world to combine economics, business and information technology. Building on a strong theoretical foundation, you will look for answers to the difficult questions facing today's businesses: how do ICTs affect behaviour on an individual and company level? To what extent do they impact productivity and performance? How can information be created, protected and managed? The Infonomics programme also has an important practical component. In addition to regular presentations and group work, you will be required to study academic papers and reanalyse them. This requires critical thinking and application of the theory you have learned. You will have to demonstrate your methodologies and whether your results are the same as those in the papers. This is excellent preparation for the real-life problems you will encounter in your future career. Curious about the programme: click below to enter the faculty website: I am coordinator of the Infonomics programme (both Bachelors and Masters) and teach the following courses: Masters CourseICT, Innovation and Economic Performance (with Mark Vluggen)The objective of this course is to understand the role of ICT on business performance and on sectoral and aggregate economic performance. It includes modeling techniques, measurement issues and methodological approaches to analyse the impact of ICT on business and economics. It also includes data analysis and research methodologies. Moreover, as we will show, innovation at more levels, e.g. organizational innovations and organizational change is needed for ICT investments to be successful. Part of the course is to analyse and report on a real life example based on either firm level data (case study) or at a sectoral or more aggregate data. Bachelors coursesICT, Organization and Income (with Arnaud Dupuy)This course gives a brief introduction into the economics of technological change and the labour market. The main aim of this course is to understand the impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on the demand for workers and on wages. What are the effects of ICT on (structures of) organizations; How does ICT impact wages and the division of labour? Do people with ICT skills earn higher wages? Next to economics this course has a more technical element in the sense that students will have to make their personal website, and post their results/assignment on it, which demonstrates their own (ICT) competences. Introduction to webprogramming with PHPPHP, officially called: "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor", is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language. It is somewhat similar to Javascript but the main difference is that Javascript is executed at the client side whereas PHP is executed at the server side. In the mid 1990’s many Web developers found that existing tools and languages were not ideal for the specific task of embedding code in markup. Those developers joined to develop a server-side scripting language which they felt would be ideal for developing dynamic Web-based sites and applications. Most of PHP's syntax is borrowed from C, although there are elements borrowed from Perl, C++ and Java as well. Perhaps the strongest and most significant feature in PHP is its support for a wide range of databases. Writing a database-enabled web page is incredibly simple. Although PHP supports many databases, we will concentrate on MySQL. This course gives an introduction in programming with PHP in combination with some simple MySQL queries in order to be able to understand the working of dynamic websites. In the first week we will discuss the features of PHP whereas in the second week students have to build one or more applications on a web-server. These applications will be used for examination. This course is primarily on programming and working with databases and not on HTML or on Web-design. Some basic principles of HTML will be discussed, however. |