Sheffield University seems to have formally renamed its Information Studies Dept as the “Information School”, which adds one more to the growing number of LIS programs that have changed names over the last few years. In their case they are labeling themselves the first ischool in the UK, though given the rather inclusive nature of the iSchool label, some might argue with that claim. The University of South Florida also changed its name from SLIS to School of Information this Spring also. Once upon a time such changes were accompanied by much complaining and doomsaying from some quarters but with other matters pressing down on higher education and libraries these days, a little more perspective on name changing seems to have resulted. That, or nobody notices anymore. A quick look at the ALA’s listing of accredited programs shows nearly 40% of them are in departments or schools that don’t have the L word in their title any longer. At this rate, in another 10 years, one imagines this will be so for the majority of accredited programs, though one hopes this is by program choice rather than closure.
The Mission of Research Universities
I attended an excellent panel this morning here on campus organized by TAMEST that explored the mission of research universities in the modern world. There were many convincing arguments made to support the claim that the presence of a top research university had enormous economic impact on the local and state economies which take us beyond the usual metrics of graduation rate and the push to drive prices down and output up! David Daniel of UT Dallas was particularly articulate in explaining the relationship between venture capital investment in the locales of research universities and the resulting employment trends from new companies. But more than an economic argument (which really seems compelling in and of itself) the panel made the case for research as a means of education, not an alternative activity on our campuses.
The opportunity for comment was so limited I could not get a chance to make another point, namely that when one examines the discovery, invention, creativity and problem-solving across disciplines, the underlying psychological processes are similar to the point that one can justifiably claim human problem-solving to be discipline-agnostic. So, when students learn through research activities, it matters less that they are studying engineering or music, computer science or sociology, the essential skills and practices they need to master are more similar than different. If there is a case for the humanities and arts in research universities, it is not that they are nice extras but rather, they are fundamental zones of enquiry whose study can help shed more light on how we discover and innovate, and consequently produce the type (not just the amount) of graduates that will continue to advance our world.
iSchool You launches new student podcasts
If you remember radio as a relaxed forum for intelligent discussion, then check out the new podcasts from iSchool students at our iSchool You site. This is a true student-run effort and to them all I say “Well Done!”
Latest wikileaks revelations
Whatever one thinks of Julian Assange and the Wikileaks phenomenon, it is hard to swallow some of the material that is turning up before us. Today’s Guardian reports on their digest of the Guantanamo files outlines how an 89 year old with senile dementia and a 14 year old kidnap victim conscripted at gunpoint by the taliban were both held as terrorist suspects. If these people really are, as Dick Cheney put it, ‘the worst of a very bad lot’ then perhaps we have less to fear from the taliban and more to fear of others. There is a mess unfolding before our eyes that will require some explaining in the days ahead. Or maybe it won’t ever be explained properly. That we are reliant on a loose coalition of newspapers using purloined material to give us basic facts that run counter to multiple official accounts of what is happening is a matter that we should all consider important in the “information age”. We hear lots about the death of privacy, but what about the death of truth?
On thinking in a time of ideology
Recent pronouncements from various think-tanks and would-be-reformers of higher education have convinced me that there is an effort afoot to eradicate a certain kind of thinking from our universities. Couched in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘productivity’, research universities are urged (and in some cases required) to explain themselves, justify their practices, measure their ‘output’ and demonstrate their need for public support. It is one thing to ask what universities provide or how they monitor the learning of their students, but it is quite another to use this line of inquiry to mask efforts to remove tenure, deny support for education, and to generally attack an institutional form whose working practices can be shown to correlate positively with economic development and, more importantly, civil democracy.
What started as economic necessity, forcing all of us to examine how we operate, has (depending on your viewpoint) either turned into or revealed itself as an assault on intellectual values. Higher education now has to demonstrate its value proposition, expressed in terms of ROI. One can legitimately ask if the costs associated with earning a degree are worth it in purely economic terms over a working career but even this reduces the value of learning to purely monetary terms. For years universities took this question on seriously and could produce convincing data. Despite some of our discomfort with even this equation of value with cost, such data is no longer sufficient.
As states reduced support for higher education, the costs shifted to the ‘consumer’ as students are now so routinely termed. A decade ago Larry Faulkner predicted the trend was unsustainable and that the economic model needed to be reconsidered. No doubt some elite schools will survive but many state schools, especially those where the state insists on controlling tuition while reducing appropriations, would be unable to function. I still hear the argument that all we have to do is raise tuition to solve the problems, and while I appreciate that it is possible to put in place structures to ensure support for the less-well-off student, the idea that tuition can rise inexorably to sustain the university as we know it just does not make sense. And of course, into this space crawl the agenda-driven types.
If education is to be reduced to an individual rather than collective good, then the tuition-driven model makes superficial sense. I pay: I get; what a perfect transaction. We’ve pushed this model to the point where the receiver gets to evaluate the provider on multiple scales, and where the consumer has started to complain that they want value for their money, as if the quality of education is as obvious and instantly assessed as a consumer product, an item of food or an entertainment experience. But unlike consumer products, the value of education is not so easily quantified or instantly assessed at the point of transaction. Socrates knew this. Medieval monks knew this. My grandmother knew this. I know it, and you should too.
The value of education, and university education in particular, lies in its amplification and enabling functions within society. The university exists to allow society space to think through issues, to explore problems that might seem trivial now but could be potentially vital in the future, to encourage people to think of what’s possible, and to provide people with the intellectual tools and encouragement to explore the unknown both while in attendance and after graduation. The system works well as long as standards for recruitment and tenuring of faculty are rigorously maintained (and clearly there is room for improvement here). If you examine who populates the best companies in the world, who invents the products, who develops the new services, and who ensures the continuity of our quality of life, you find university graduates. This is not a coincidence, it’s an outcome. Our universities yield collective benefits, the kind that are completely overlooked in the reduction of education to an individual investment. It’s difficult to have a sensible conversation on this subject when any use of the word ‘collective’ is interpreted as ‘communism’. That is where ideology has failed us.
I am reminded forcefully of how far we have traveled from the idea of intellectual freedom when I read of the open records ‘request’ made by politicians in Wisconsin to view the emails of William Cronon, a history professor. The New York Times op-ed piece refers to this quite accurately as a ‘shabby crusade‘ and it’s obvious to most fair-minded people that this is an effort aimed at scaring off those who speak out. The calls for efficiency, transparency and cost-reduction in higher education are justifiable in times of scarce public-resources, but when they are used as a smoke-screen for attacks on people who think, and especially people who think differently, it is time for transparency to be demanded of the callers.
Journal of IA, new issue
Launching a new journal is difficult but sustaining it is perhaps even harder. All the more credit then to the editors of the Journal of Information Architecture for getting over the hurdles and keeping the publication moving. In its second volume, issue 2 has just been released and while we might quibble over the ongoing discussion of what it means to be an IA, the title has survived and there’s a real group of professionals who make their living as information architects, despite the predictions of cynics.
Refereeing papers: is it time for open reviews?
For reasons that I can’t fully articulate, I’ve been frustrated with the quality of publications in many of our supposedly leading journals. Two decades of publishing my own work have taught me that there is huge variability in reviewer quality and one might be very surprised to learn that some of the top-ranked journals in IS, for example, provide the worst examples (by which I mean not rejections but comments that are extremely limited, occasionally incorrect or based on clear oversight of the paper’s true contents, or sometimes wilful ignorance). I am open to the idea that fully open reviewing might help though part of me clings to the ideal that double-blind reviewing is ‘fairer’. I have no doubt that the business of publication has taken on a new urgency as scholars try to establish their research credentials and publishers need to ensure sufficient content but it’s hard to overlook the fact that one does not have to look too hard at the literature to find methodologically or statistically-flawed studies, and that is before we cover the waterfront of trendy, incomplete and work uninformed by prior relevant scholarship that is presented as ‘cutting-edge’.
Seems the problems are not limited to our discipline. Prompted to read a couple of recent papers on the struggles of Computer Science to improve its publications quality, I found this blog entry at the CACM site, reporting that Moshe Vardi, editor in chief of Communication of the ACM feels it’s time for a change too. Apparently his keynote at the Informatics Europe conference called attention to shoddy refereeing practices in Computer Science. Bertrand Meyer. the blogger above, has a detailed strategy that he uses in his reviews to push this cause and it’s hard to object. I realize editors are supposed to maintain reviewing standards but with limited time and a reliance on completely volunteer faculty members to serve as your reviewers, the system as structured can be seen to have built-in problems.
The big society or local socialism? Public library future under ‘review’ in Yorkshire
Nice video piece from The Guardian covering the closure of libraries in Yorkshire, a situation described as the creation of the big society by a government keen to utilize local volunteers to run public services no longer deemed sustainable or valuable enough to fund. Seems the one ‘success’ story involves a local village pub that now hosts the book collection. So the future is clear….we need more local pubs.
[later] And this sunday the Independent has the story on the front page of its national edition. So public library funding is a top story in the UK. What does it take to make the national news in the US?Culturomics is us
According to a new paper in Science by Michel and Aiden, we are on the dawn of a new form of study, Cuturnomics, enabled by the Google Books. A research team analyzed the language in the millions of books now digitized and yes, searchable. Among the many interesting findings (other than you can make up a word for a field and have it passed along in record time) are:
- The English language is growing by more than 8500 words per annum
- The majority of words in the lexicon are undocumented in standard reference materials
- The half life of the past is decreasing – we reference the past much less much faster than before
- Media stars become famous faster and obsolete quicker (phew!)
- Freud is more frequently referenced in our world than Darwin, Einstein or Galileo…but probably not as much as Lady Gaga this year…..(I made that last bit up)
Fascinating stuff really, and further proof that digital tools give us access (and thereby potential analysis) of text corpora that could simply not be analyzed by previous researchers. Culturomics indeed (wouldn’t culturnomics be better?) .More at: http://www.culturomics.org/
Law Librarianship
The latest issue of Spectrum, the magazine of the American Association of Law Librarians, includes a paper by a colleague and I outlining the new joint degree program in Info and Law here at UT. We tried to write something more than ‘this is what the degree program looks like’ by explaining what we feel are the needs for a new kind of education at the intersection of information and law. In general, the competency based model of education for professionals seems to us to have real limitations that are overlooked too often. Not sure where this places us in terms of others but I suspect we are in a minority.