Category: Uncategorized

The greeting card industry seems to have sustained itself despite the onslaught of digital alternatives, at least if my mailbox is anything to go by. Most schools and major units at my own university send cards out bearing seasonal salutations and best wishes for the new year etc. The card is more than symbolic, it actually is a revealing information object worthy of some analysis. Image choice is an obvious entry point. I prefer arty minimalism but I’m clearly in the minority. Gaudy colors and tired images of snow, bells, trees and landscapes abound. Tradition clearly lives and dominates the greeting card industry. Then there’s the group pics of the staff and faculty, the less said of which the better. IF you want to see what life is like in another unit, the group shot probably reveals more than the collective h-index.

Depressingly, many of these missives are unsigned. To me, this says a lot more than it should about the motives and genuine wishes of the senders, and you don’t need NSA clearance to read that signal. I mean, what is the point of sending an unsigned card to a supposed colleague? The lack of handwriting tells me the card was an afterthought, a rushed obligation handled by a staff member with a master list. You might think information professionals would be a little more aware of the signals they were sending but apparently not. And don’t get me started on the cost of all this symbolic signalling of goodwill. Am sure someone in a business suit has made the case for sending cards and produced a system for ensuring all contacts are included. So much for business analysis – the unsigned card is the biggest party-damper going. Bah humbug?

The release of the latest test results from the Program for International Student Assessment is big news overseas as most nations consider how well their teenagers are performing scholastically. The news has been a little quieter here in the US, perhaps because our 15 year olds perform below average on two of the three areas tested. You can get full coverage at the National Center for Education Statistics site where the measures, spread, and various percentages are cut open for examination but the big picture is not a very optimistic one. The Results by country or regional (some regions were assessed independently) ranking looks something like this:

1 Shanghai
2 Singapore
3 Hong Kong
4 Taiwan
5 S. Korea
6 Macau-China
7 Japan
8 Lichenstein
9 Switzerland
10 Netherlands
11 Estonia
12 Finland
13 Canada
14 Poland
15 Belgium
16 Germany
17 Vietnam
18 Austria
19 Australia
20 Ireland

As you can see, there’s a strong Asian, then European domination of the top 20, with Canada being the only country represented from the Americas. The US ranked 36th overall. Within the US, several states were assessed independently, with Florida scoring below average on 2/3 areas also though Mass did a little better. Just looking at OECD countries, the US ranked 26/34 on Math. Sobering, is how some are describing it. Or as one way on the Washington post comments section noted ‘at least we’re tops in football’….I’m fairly sure he did not mean soccer.

The recent article in LJ about the real or imaginary differences between F2F and distance education was sparked by a survey of employers that suggested they prefer graduates from F2F programs. Cue an onslaught (well, at least a few) replies that spoke of the convenience of DE, how great their program is, and how there’s no real difference anyhow. I think this is the wrong argument. It’s not the medium it’s the message, or in this case, the content. Good programs are good programs. Poor programs are well….you get it. Sadly, there’s very little reliable information for those seeking guidance. I happen to think there’s a very real difference between the type of experiences you can get in a F2F program such as ours and one that lives entirely online. You just cannot replicate the interactivity, exposure and networking we provide in a purely digital program. But if you just want to talk classroom content, the goal, we hope, is to do a bit better than this:

As I work my way through the documentation and data gathering required for our accreditation review, I stumbled across a current article on the ‘crisis’ in legal education by Genevieve Blake Tung. She presents rather alarming data points for lawyers and law schools of which I was not aware. For example, employment rates for law graduates have been on the decline since 2008 and less then 66% of law school graduates obtain jobs requiring bar passage. Projected graduate supply outstrips likely demand by 3:2 and there are now extensive critiques of the problems with legal education and the disconnectedness between law schools and practice. Sound familiar? I don’t have any similar readings in medicine, social work, architecture or education but I wonder how hard it is to turn up equivalent expressions of disquiet in these professional domains? I suppose the better question is, was there ever a time when the professional community in any field deemed the educational preparation of its future members to be appropriate, affordable, and sufficient?

This weekend marks the graduation of another cohort of information students from the iSchool and I always love our convocation ceremony that we hold in the afternoon, before the main UT event. We try to make it a celebratory experience for graduates and their families, with appropriate reminders of the importance of education and the value of the the graduates’ achievements. This year, it will be particularly noteworthy as we are delighted to have as our guest speaker, Ambassador Sichan Siv. His is no ordinary story and my words cannot do justice to the man. You can find out more in the video below.

Interview with Ambassador Sichan Siv: From The Killing Fields to the White House and United Nations from Morgan Freeman on Vimeo.

Congratulations to all our graduates. You earned your degree by not taking the easy options. I salute you all and wish you the very best in the years ahead.

It’s been awhile since the last ROI argument about public libraries which showed a 7:1 return on every dollar invested in a state’s public library system so it’s timely that a new study is just out looking at the recent situation in Texas. Here’s the official release — am no economist but it’s good to see the authors realistically talking about the difficulties of quantifying returns here while showing that what we can measure indicates real positive impact.

“The Texas State Library The Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) has released a study showing that in 2011 the economic benefit from Texas public libraries totaled an astounding $2.407 billion, while collectively the libraries cost less than $0.545 billion. The return on investment was thus $4.42 for each dollar invested. The study was prepared for TSLAC by the Bureau of Business Research at the University of Texas at Austin and is available at www.tsl.state.tx.us/roi for immediate review and dissemination.”

Having lived under the Tory governments of Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, I find the eulogizing somewhat at odds with the reality I experienced. Still, the campaign to whitewash political ideologies over time is hardly unique to Thatcherism or Reaganism. Kudos though to Glenda Jackson for speaking out (despite efforts to shut her up but current members of parliament) as portrayed in this Guardian video

Pretty much how I remember it too. Need work? “On yer bike” then and move. “There is no such thing as society’….Ah yes, all sharp knees and elbows as Glenda puts it. She has not lost her theatrical flourishes through age and let’s be thankful. If only politicians here were as engaging (‘home-perm cautionary tale’ Rand Paul aside, thank you Stephen Colbert for that one). Let Thatcher have her goodbyes, she certainly was committed and hard working, but let’s not forget some of the warts.

Though I knew it was coming, it was still a very sad moment to hear that Glynn Harmon died on Sunday night. I’ve known the man for the last dozen years and he was a very unique person, warm of heart, gentle of spirit, and completely independent in his thinking. Others felt the same as you can read at a blog set up for remembrances. I met him first when I interviewed at Texas and and I liked him immediately. Over the next dozen years I had many conversations with Glynn where he shared with me memories of the early tensions between library and information science, the history of our school, and the prospects for a field of information. He rarely gets the credit he deserves for being one of the earliest advocates for a true information discipline and I suspect many junior faculty do not know how engaged he was in shaping the discourse in the 1970s and 1980s that helped create the grounds for the iSchool movement decades later.

Glynn bequeathed me his complete set of ARIST, all 45 volumes of this review series which like Glynn, is sadly no more. As I look at the stacked volumes on my shelf I am reminded of Glynn, the passing of time, and the interwoven history of people, ideas, and themes that make up our intellectual world. Glynn always believed the published literature of scholarly research contained hidden insights to be discovered and that our discipline should be at the forefront of enabling this process. I hope that in due course, the gems of his own ideas are similarly discovered by those who were never fortunate enough to know the man when he lived.  Be at peace Glynn, as yet you live.

 

 

Yesterday I was the speaker at UT Business School’s Leadership Lecture series at the AT&T Center. It’s an interesting audience but very hard to know the level at which to pitch ideas. I kept it miles high to make the essential points about big data being naturally constrained by human information processing limits. Lots of interesting questions and a good opportunity to showcase the school of information to folks who otherwise might not know about us. The Daily Texan ran an article today on the talk. My thanks to the Business School team led by Gayle Hight for a well-organized process and invitation.