theorywatch

Had a useful introduction to the incoming 5033 class taught by Dr. Lester and Dr. Snead this afternoon. Dr. Lester asked the faculty to talk about their own “advising style” and I remarked that I was trying to overcome my tendency to be a “helicopterish advisor.” The good thing is that students can ignore the advice of a helicopter advisor without feeling guilty— unlike ignoring the advice of a helicopter parent! And certainly people are free to ignore my advice all the time, with no hard feelings, which is congruent with the “core values” of advising from the OU Provost’s Advisory Committee on Academic Advising (PACAA) as quoted below:

“Students can be responsible for their own behavior.

Students can be successful as a result of their individual goals and efforts.

Students have a desire to learn.

Learning needs vary according to individual skills, goals and experiences.

Students hold their own beliefs and opinions.

Advisors are responsible to the students and individuals they serve.

Advisors are responsible for involving others, where appropriate, in the advising process.

Advisors are responsible to the college or university in which they work.

Advisors are responsible to higher education generally.

Advisors are responsible to the community (including the local community, state, and region in which the institution is located).

Advisors are responsible to their professional role as advisors and to themselves personally.”

So, I’ll continue to work on keeping my helicopter in an appropriate airspace to allow students to earn their own wings!

Also had a revelation about managing my own digital identity a bit better (something that I preach about constantly in KM/LIS 5433, by the way!), as Dr. Lester had the incoming students “research” their newly assigned advisors’ educational, publication, and service history from publicly-available information on the web. Though there’s probably much more information about me in this blog than anyone would want to know, I don’t have a posted vita on my OU faculty webpage. I’d better take my own advice about that!

So, as I prep for opening the “Design and Implementation of Web-Based Information Services” class website on Monday, I’m enjoying this. Go, Millennials!

A little plug for a great little unconference next month on “participatory learning.” Hmmm, now where have I heard about that before? It just might work!

More about information professional competencies, classic and contemporary foundations of the field, competing and complementary definitions of information, knowledge, wisdom, and the diverse societal groupings that generate these, evolving information ecologies and economies, the increasing convergence of collecting and collections, libraries as place and space, the complex controversies of copyright, copyleft, copytheft, and copyfraud….

(Hopefully most of the 25 other people in the class got something out of it too.)

No, I don’t know why the additional “fee” for LIS 5433 is $75, more than double that of any other Internet-only course in the School. It’s a legitimate question, though, so if I find out, I’ll post the answer!

Update: the answer is that all 3-hour Internet-only courses are supposed to have the same $75 fee, and that Enrollment Services is supposed to take care of updating this on the enrollment website. So it looks like LIS 5433 is the only course right now that has the “correct” fee: sorry for the sticker shock when all the others are updated!

So I gave some advice that turned out to be unnecessary when I proctored in Tulsa last month: that it would be wise to do a little brush-up after comps on any question that looked like it might be troublesome (just in case one was called to do an oral defense.)

It’s still good advice, though, and I’m posting it here because I’ve proctored twice in a row now, so it’s unlikely that I’ll be proctoring again for the next few exams. So remember that there are often only a few days between being notified that one has to “defend” a question and the actual defense date. “Doing one’s homework” the week before that isn’t cheating: it’s common sense, because the faculty certainly expects one to prepare for the defense (even if one wasn’t prepared for the question itself!) Being able to mention some recent literature relevant to the topic doesn’t exactly hurt, hint hint. So, after comps and before defense: don’t wait to be called. During the defense: don’t wait to be called upon. Remember that you chose this method of “final assessment.”

Or choose the portfolio option!

In all my advice-giving on comps, it never occurred to me to mention that each question should be read as a whole: don’t just extract the last sentence from the context of the entire question and answer that as if it were a stand-alone question. (Especially if you answer it without any reference to the context of the coursework, the program or the profession itself: that’s a pretty sure-fire way to find yourself doing an oral defense, I’m afraid!)

Although it would be an interesting exercise to analyze previous questions in terms of keywords and their varying contexts, I’m quite sure that I won’t do that. But here’s a Wordle from the words in previous questions while you’re waiting to hear about how you did on these questions!

I handed back the LIS 5033 essays on “how much information do we need?” and was struck by the variety of approaches taken to this (admittedly highly ambiguous) question, in which everyone had to define “information,” “we,” and “need” and make at least some use of the “how much information is there” project data from Lyman and Varian (if only to dismiss its value to the way they were interpreting the prompt.)

Some great syntheses of readings from within the class and from other classes, some pragmatic approaches to measurement and management, a few highly idiosyncratic “takes” on the question, a couple of very creative ones that really would have benefited from having more time and space than the assignment allowed, one or two that made me laugh, and the rest fairly conventional “five paragraph essays” that should serve as good exercises in how to do these.

At least I don’t make people do these as group writing projects (because I need more information about them than that!)

For what it’s worth, I’m going to be the proctor for comps in Tulsa yet again, so if anyone has questions about the process (though, obviously, not about the questions!), I’d be happy to entertain them. (In fact, I’m told that I can be very entertaining!) If anyone who has signed up for spring comps hasn’t been in the Tulsa computer lab lately, please be aware that you’ll be using Microsoft Word 2007 in there for the exam, so you might want to check the room and the machines out ahead of time. (Try to minimize the number of new things you’ll have to deal with that morning, as it’s generally stressful enough.)

Also, please be sure that you’re doing what we always ask you to do: keep on top of professional issues as they are impacted by current events, and, when you see the questions, think like the manager we hope that you’ll eventually become!

(And, if you’re not thinking of yourself as a “library manager,” and you still have the opportunity to choose a final assessment method, I’d encourage you to look at the portfolio experience: the portfolios I’ve seen lately are very customized to the individual’s professional interests and goals and seemed to work quite well.)

I’ve always wanted to use the expression “mad props,” but frankly it doesn’t fit into much of the discourse I have here as a faculty member.

However, “mad props” to the few people who figured out how to submit a course evaluation for “Digital Collections” last semester (which was unusually difficult, due to the bizarre administrative ruling that it wasn’t an online course and wasn’t part of the online evaluation process…. and yet the only way to distribute the course evaluation OCR form at the end of the class was in fact online!)

Otherwise I apparently would have gotten no credit at all in our annual faculty evaluation for designing, developing, and delivering this new course.

So, “mad props” to those four anonymous people and their honest opinions as to what they liked and disliked about last semester!