Oh, I feel badly for the anonymous student this past semester who wrote the following comment in the eVAL course evaluation for the LIS 5033 class: “The instructor should give explicit directions with rubrics for everything.”
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!)
Well, the orientation for KM/LIS 5033 was Friday, and hopefully we’re off to a great start! The two sections that I teach are in Norman and Tulsa (as it’s online, natch!), so Dr. Snead (who has an additional Norman section of 5033, as the new student numbers were much higher than expected) and I shared orientation “facilitating” duties at both sites. Our new director gave an excellent and fun talk, OLISSA provided pizza for all, and I hope that everybody went home feeling pretty comfortable about the program and what it can offer them.
One thing I said during the orientation was that this program, at its best, is something like the book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven. That is, you can both influence and be influenced by people you won’t realize were important to you until afterward. That influence can be both personal and professional, I believe.
For me, those “five people” back in the seventies when I was at school in Syracuse were: the creative theorist I never dreamed I could become (Bob Taylor, dean of the School), the best friend forever I wanted to find (Jon Martens, then a fellow graduate assistant, now my husband), the thoughtful scholar I hoped to mature into someday (Antje Lemke, humanities professor at the School), the teacher I didn’t want to be anything like — ever—! (who shall remain nameless here, as she’s long since left both the faculty and the profession), and the hard-working information professional I needed to become very quickly (another of my classmates who will also remain nameless, but who seemed not only completely “grown-up” to me— as most people over the age of 23 did to me back then, when I was one of the younger students in the program— but who also delighted in the career possibilities ahead for us all.)
So, those are my five people. I hope everyone in my 5033 class will have at least that many “people” to remember from their time in our School.
So, we have a position for an assistant professor in our School open right now, as June Lester retired last May. If you’re looking at my blog in an attempt to find out more about us, and are even more curious about what our students are like, try reading this blog from one of our recent graduates. If this is the kind of student you’d like to work with, you may indeed want to apply here!
Having a really positive teaching evaluation from someone who’s herself a winner of the ALISE Teaching Award for Excellence in Library and Information Science to put in my tenure dossier—- priceless!
Thanks to all the students in my classes who have contributed student evaluations over the past four years. Many of them were very helpful in pointing out things that I could be doing to enhance their learning environment and praising things that I was doing well. A learning experience for all concerned.
Thanks to the recent alums who wrote such nice letters on my behalf.
Special thanks to dear Barbara Kwasnik at Syracuse, who encouraged me to try teaching, when it was not really something that I had ever considered doing.
And now the dossier’s done, and turned in for the long tenure deliberation process over the summer.
(Oh, and some of my research isn’t bad, either!)
We had a straight line wind incident near our house in Tulsa early the other morning. Apparently one can sleep through tornado sirens, because I did! No damage to our house, though many trees came down in the neighborhood, and power was off for about 30 hours. One doesn’t realize how Net-addicted one is until one is forced to go cold turkey like that!
A good thing about the enforced “idleness,” though, was that I was able to devote my undivided attention to Donald McKenzie’s brilliant essay “Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts.” He dealt in such a prescient way with the various issues that we are having today with “texts”— and this was 25 years ago. And the really good thing is that, having read it, I can now recommend it to all my students (and tell them, no, it’s not at all about “how to cite things”!)
Interesting that I didn’t come across Perrow’s piece “On Not Using Libraries” while I was at Syracuse, though I certainly read much of his other work, especially his books on Complex Organizations and Normal Accidents. I think this is probably explained by the fact that the libraries article appeared in an obscure conference-related journal back in 1989, when there was no Web to pick up these pieces (pun intended, as I found the reference to the article on the JESSE listserv just now, thanks to a provocative poster in the Netherlands, and I was easily able to find the article itself online).
His point is even more pointed today, obviously. If I were to read everything that interested me on a professional level, I would be spending my whole life in my virtual library here. (And with no personal or pleasure reading at all!)
So the idea of “hiding” things from the people who would otherwise be obsessed by them is a provocative one: it’s so “anti-library” that it grates on me, and yet it makes a great deal of sense….
(These were originally written for people facing oral defenses for the OU School of Library & Information Studies comprehensive exams, but obviously they work in a lot of other “trial by fire” situations!)
1. Don’t bother to figure out why the faculty panel might have called you in to talk about a particular question.
2. Don’t review and reassess your recollection of your original answer to see what might be missing or wrong.
3. Don’t do any additional reading to help you better answer the question that was asked.
4. Don’t rehearse what you’ll say when the faculty panel asks you how you’d like to revise or add to your original answer.
5. Don’t volunteer any information: make the panel pull your responses out of you, one by one.
These are all HUGE mistakes to make when facing an oral defense: don’t let this be you, folks. The faculty truly wants everybody to pass, but we can’t do it for you. Be prepared!
On my way back from the iSchools conference now: an excellent event with lots and lots of interesting new ideas about digital collections. My own presentation (“The impact of outliers”) on the study of practice theories was well-received, though it is certainly on the far side of typical iSchool interests (and I was obviously the only presenter from Oklahoma, lol!) But I’m happy with it, and I picked up a couple of useful suggestions. The conference paper is now in the Ideals repository.
I got to see my own “real” dissertation advisor (not the one who’s formally listed for me in the MPACT database, lol, but the original one who left Syracuse before I defended), so that was a nice and unexpected reunion.
And I also got the best souvenir ever from Marcia Bates!!!!
Ah, KM/LIS 5433 (Design & Implementation of Web-Based Information Services) is finished for this semester, and, as usual, one of the best contributions showed up after the class was “officially” over. Many thanks to Cathy Koloff for pointing me towards this! (Our final projects were pretty good also: see the “Virtual Project Fair” in the tab above.)
The preliminary fall 2010 schedule is up, and it looks like I’ll be teaching KM/LIS 5033 again. **does happy dance** I really like teaching this course, as it reminds me of when I was 22, starting the program at Syracuse, and had the great good fortune to have the illustrious Bob Taylor (Dean of the School) as my instructor for the similar course there (IST 501: “The Information Society.”) I think I probably understood only about half of what he was teaching back then, but it had a tremendous impact on me during my subsequent career. All options were wide open to those who saw the value of information! (And I try to keep that same spirit when I teach 5033, though I think it’s a little disconcerting to people who come into the program with a very narrow focus in mind.)
And, of course, I also believe that it’s never too late to become what you were meant to be!
