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.
Back at the beginning of the semester in KM/LIS 5033, we had the usual introduction to the so-called DIKW hierarchy, which turned out to be WIKID cool in our reinterpretation. Thinking of another hierarchy (and its possibilities), I wonder what might happen to Bloom’s (revised) taxonomy if we were to look at that with an equally critical eye? (Special thanks to Andrew Churches of Auckland, New Zealand, for providing the Edorigami wikispace, because it provides additional digital resources with which to think about this!)
What with people worrying about their portfolio defenses, or upcoming comprehensive exams, or end-of-semester final projects, or even that paper due on Monday, it’s probably about time to hear from Paul Potts. Just listen.
Interesting discussion last night in the 5033 seminar about the so-called “DIKW hierarchy” as one information model that we could possibly place in the “Entity/Intangible” cell of Michael Buckland’s “Information As” matrix, which led to my rambling on about the Arete Initiative, which I’ve blogged about earlier, and also to some useful exchanges about the nature of “wisdom” itself (in the sense both of big-W Wisdom and of little-w wisdom: thanks, Ruth and Darlene!)
And it occurred to me that although I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a number of rather brilliant people, there’s only one person whom I’ve ever encountered whom I believe could truly be “classified” as W/wise in both senses:
Professor emerita Antje Lemke, who taught “the humanities” to any number of LIS students at Syracuse not only through her gentle learning and fascinating conversation but through her life. I would say that dear Antje is both my platonic and my pragmatic ideal of a “librarian”…. and perhaps that’s why I get so excited about welcoming people into her profession!
I’m curious as to why such clever folks as these at the University of Chicago would think that people whose primary qualification is that of having gotten their doctorate within the past 10 years would be better able to define wisdom than any other group. Read more…
