The British Library may be seeking “relevance” with this project, as libraries across the United Kingdom continue to be shut down, but Google’s goal is hardly that.

One of the several reasons I’ve enjoyed being a part of this (beyond getting to know some really smart people committed to working together on the overall health of Tulsa as a community) is that one of the texts being used is Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, which is an innovative new take on MIT’s classic “systems thinking” approach that I learned at Syracuse under the guidance of Bob Benjamin. Theory U attempts to put the soul back into the system, by considering all stakeholders and all externalities, not just the internal logic and feedback loops. Although I doubt that it represents a “silver bullet” that could be widely applied to transforming the norms of “corporate culture” in America, it is very, very well suited to what they’re trying to do here at OU-Tulsa.

Something to think about (as well as something to do!)….

How could I not have noticed that someone was that unsuited for graduate-level work?

What a terrible time this person will have in the rest of the program, let alone in the profession, with that kind of expectation, obviously focused on the getting of “points” to the exclusion of getting the real point of “Information & the Knowledge Society.”

And didn’t even win a free iPad from eValuate.

*sigh*

Update: Upon reflection, since the evaluation was online (just like the course itself, lol!), perhaps I am taking this comment out of context. I just don’t think that anyone who managed to survive a whole semester with me (without dropping the course!) could have written this. (Except to tease , in which case it certainly worked!)

Not every thing went well (I could have done more to support some of the discussion forums, for instance), but some things went extraordinarily well. And because those things were “owned” by people in the class, I may never know what their impact outside the class will be. But I do hope that the projects take on a life of their own now, whether it’s the animal-oriented inquiry project for low-income first graders, the evidence-based teaching methods tutorial for physics teaching assistants, the information coaching/research stages model, the middle-school health literacy videos, the health law resources tutorial for non-lawyer researchers, or the content creators guides to various “public domains,” to name a few. Or that, at least, the people who created the things like these will go on to do even better projects!

One of the questions was whether the respondents considered themselves bibliometricians. Interestingly, I can’t recall what I answered to that (though I recall the survey itself) and I don’t know even now whether I would consider myself a “bibliometrician.” Certainly not in the sense that someone like Anthony van Raan is. And, yet, since I cite a lot of bibliometric work and use bibliometrics in my little bag of tricks, maybe I am. I do seem to fit the major criterion that Case and Miller use to differentiate self-identified bibliometricians from other citing scholars: I often cite articles as concept symbols. Perhaps if they had phrased their question differently (“Are you a huge fan of Henry Small’s work?”), I would have had less difficulty, because the answer would be yes, yes, yes!

However, since the evaluation survey response rate from the class was roughly 85%, I can safely say that the the majority of comments were favorable, which is probably the best that instructors can realistically hope for!