theorywatch

One thing I haven’t mentioned in the blog (because I haven’t been doing very much blogging) is that for the past year I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of participating in the School of Community Medicine’s Faculty Academy which is a year-long interdisciplinary program headed by Dr. Dan Duffy that brings together faculty from the health and non-health-related disciplines on the Schusterman Center campus. This involves a weeklong summer immersion program along with incoming medical students and current students in our other health-related programs such as pharmacy and nursing, as well as monthly all-day meetings focused on particular participatory research-related topics about community health issues. Interested faculty are encouraged to involve themselves as deeply as they wish.

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!)….

One of the difficulties of theorizing pretty much on my own is that it’s a very slow process, as apparently things take a long time to heat up in my little crockpot of a brain. I just had a flash of insight about one of my models, and I suspect that it’s something that other people in my specific little niche might have seen right away, because it’s a very obvious connection between two separate literatures (if you happen to know them…..)

Oh, well, speaking of flashes, I’ve just submitted my heavily revised manuscript (“Practicing Theories: Citation Analysis for Practice Fields”) to Manuscript Central right in the middle of one of the many lightning storms and tornado watches we’ve had here in Tulsa this week. Hopefully it will electrify the reviewers as well (in a positive way— usually I just make people’s hair stand on end!)

Update: it didn’t exactly electrify them, but it’s still apparently novel and interesting enough that I do get another chance to submit another heavily revised version. One reviewer is fine with the current version, the other made lots of actually quite helpful suggestions that I will work on. No problems with the data, just the way I frame this within the literature. Now I know why people sometimes thank their anonymous reviewers so effusively!!

Going to the American Educational Research Association conference in Denver to present my expanded theory functions model in one of the “Education for the Professions” sessions there. It’s a huge conference, and I only have about 15 minutes to present, but I was lucky to get accepted, as they receive about 10,000 submissions each year. (Unbelievable, but that’s what the acceptance letter said!)

After all the years of researching these practice theories, and summarizing them into multiple case studies, what it comes down to is basically one slide: my model of the “social life of theories” which has changed dramatically since the much simpler version in my dissertation.

Well, I hope to get some good comments on that slide, at least!

And the “practice theories” that I’ve been studying over the past few years have practical consequences.

The case of Dr. Steven Hatfill, for example, was aggravated by the “theories-in-use” by the FBI and others regarding who was responsible for the famous “anthrax letters”….

Interesting piece by librarian Barbara Fister in this week’s Library Journal, which caught my eye particularly because she made use of the “liberation” trope so popular in the 1960s and 1970s thanks to Father Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation.

One of the findings from the research I presented last week in Champaign at the iSchools conference was that Gutiérrez’s theory of liberation was much more effective in adding to academic discourse in a variety of fields beyond theology than it was in changing the Magisterium of the Catholic Church itself (which was Gutiérrez’s real goal— he was a practicing priest in Peru, not an academic seeking tenure, though he’s now teaching at Notre Dame.)

This speaks, I think to Fister’s colleague’s interest in theory and practice, though I too am having difficulty locating the articles she mentions as being behind various library firewalls, lol!

Finished Perry Mehrling’s excellent Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance recently. (I had thought of using Black as one of my “practitioner” theorists but instead went with Jack Treynor, as Black seemed more much academically focused, despite his stints at Arthur D. Little, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs.) Mehrling’s book is an interesting blend of biographies of the man himself and of his theories, but what I liked most was the description of Black’s method of teaching: instead of lecturing, which he felt was a total waste of his own valuable time, he would work through the “50 big questions” in finance with each class. (And to do this back in the 70s was very innovative indeed!) Apparently the students loved it, and many dreamed of having Dr. Black make a note to himself about their comment, as that meant it was something that he wanted to think about.

To me, Black’s most intriguing quote is: “Information is more valuable sold than used” (page 138). He actually published an options-oriented newsletter giving his own proprietary estimates of volatility while he was teaching at Chicago, instead of being involved with trading at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, which was made possible at least partially because of his theories. Perhaps fellow options geniuses Robert C. Merton and Myron Scholes should have taken that advice instead of helping to found Long-Term Capital Management! (Though this comment does not sound nearly as snide now as it did before every possible risk management vehicle crashed and burned in the past year or so.)

But what Black is best known for is, of course, not receiving the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics for the Black-Scholes-Merton model (shared instead by Merton and Scholes) because he succumbed to throat cancer in 1995 (and the Prize is not awarded posthumously, alas.) On the other hand, although he died at 57, it seems as though he lived his life pretty much exactly as he might have liked. And, of course, both his children and his theories survive him.

I really like this theory-driven approach to curriculum development at the Communications Studies Department at the University of Twente, but, then, I would, wouldn’t I?

Wasn’t planning to go to ALISE in Boston this January, as I’ve been to the previous two ALISE conferences (Denver and Philly) and travel funds are tight right now … until I found out that the keynote speaker will be Tom Malone of MIT. Dr. Malone was one of the theorists I studied for my diss, and he was amazingly generous with his time and recollections during the interview I was lucky enough to snag with him. He’s been invited to speak becaue the ALISE conference theme is “collaboration,” and I’m sure he’ll be brilliant. So I’ll be saving my pennies for a plane ticket, I think!

The most interesting thing about Dr. Malone, however, is that he’s what is called a “serial theorist”: he is not only known for coordination theory, but for the “electronic markets and hierarchies” theory (developed with Bob Benjamin and JoAnn Yates, both of MIT) that preceded it, and for his dissertation work on “what makes things fun to learn?” back in the 1970s, which remains a classic theory in the instructional design field as well. (He’s probably done even more, but those are the ones that I happen to know about.)

So… what makes someone a “serial theorist”? It wasn’t my dissertation topic, but I wish it had been!

Since I’ve been rather desultory in blogging lately (well, actually, more like delinquent, someone asked me recently if I was going to move to micro-blogging, and my answer was no, no, no— I can barely manage the meso-blogging, and my preference would be to do macro-blogging, like Richard Cox, who did an exemplary job on all things archival, though, sadly, he discontinued his blog this past spring), I thought I’d do a quick catch-up post today.

Anyway…. what I did was to work and work on my theory functions model, which wasn’t general enough to accommodate all the “types” of theories that I was hoping to use it for. So now I have a revised model, which is much more interesting than the old one, and which I hope to start sharing very soon as I start to submit for publication. Whew! “All models are wrong, etc.,” but when it’s your model that’s wrong (and you realize that you’re the only one interested enough to try to improve it) , that’s a challenge! Hopefully it will start to become more useful now. I’ve already submitted a session paper to the AERA conference in Denver next spring, introducing the revised model, as that seems the group most likely to be interested in a “theory functions model’ that integrates practice theory into a functional model of theoretical development.

In the course of doing this, I did a lot of innovation-related reading, in the fields of defense, finance, healthcare, law, software, technology, and theology. So much for thinking that, just because I have a “terminal” degree in “information transfer,” there isn’t a whole lot of relevant diffusion-related literature to which I’d never been exposed in grad school! The diffusion of military doctrine was particularly interesting, as I’d already run across a bit of that at Cornell University Press, which has a formidable security studies series, under the direction of their equally formidable executive editor Roger Haydon.

I organized the “Innovation” track for the KPM Symposium here in Tulsa, which had some wonderful speakers (on all tracks!) We had former NASA mission control insider Jim O’Neal as keynote speaker, and he talked about “lessons learned and unlearned” from the Apollo 13 moon mission, which was a riveting presentation, and very relevant to knowledge management research. Organizers Chuck Tryon and Suliman Hawamdeh (my senior colleague) did a brilliant job of orchestrating this event, which also celebrated the first anniversary of the opening of our new Learning Center here on the OU-Tulsa campus.

Supervised an excellent student internship at the innovative and well-managed Hardesty Regional Library here in Tulsa: what a great learning experience for both the student and myself!

Wrote some references for various students and former students, who are seeking scholarships and new jobs. Always was a bit reluctant to “bother” my own faculty mentors at Syracuse with this type of activity (though they were always kind and helpful about it!), but now I realize that they really must not have minded, because I am delighted to do this for my folks here. (And it helps me track what’s actually being looked for, which is good for helping other students in future.) Who knew??!!!

Prepared for the “Design and Implementation of Web-Based Information Services” course, which now includes some cool new ideas about discovery tools and inquiry tools that I’m anxious to try out, since I know that there’s a pretty high level of talent and interest in those people coming into the class this fall.

Also had a two-week vacation with my absolute favorite doctoral student (aka Jon, my husband, who’s enjoying his well-earned early retirement from IBM by being a hardworking graduate assistant at the School of Education at OSU), to Albuquerque, Palm Springs, Tucson, and to Marfa, Texas (to visit the famous Chinati Foundation there, not the Marfa lights, despite my dark and dubious tabloidish past.)

And I came up with some other ideas…..

I’ve had a total crush on Peter Galison ever since reading his How Experiments End way back when. Adored his Objectivity (quick, it’s discounted at Amazon, buy it!), and his film Secrecy. And I find this interview absolutely fascinating, even though my knowledge of physics and metaphysics is absurdly limited. I am such a theory groupie!