#danahjsb network

Image size depends on the user’s number of followers. Edge color depends on the kind of edge – yellow indicates a following relationship, blue a reply/mention relationship. Compare our graph to Marc Smith’s graph of the #win09 hashtag users:

#win09 network

You’ll notice a couple of things. First, Marc is better with NodeXL than I am, and his graph is just easier to read. Then, dig a little deeper and notice that the network of users who used the #danahjsb hashtag is more densely connected. The #win09 network is brokered by the guy in the middle, and the #danahjsb network has no obvious brokers. More to come on my thoughts about the symposium talk and panel, stay tuned.

* only users whose tweets are public are included in these network diagrams

More Info:

What the hashtag?! – view the tweets

Coming Soon – watch the symposium talk and panel

JSB Symposium info
Tuesday, October 13
2pm
Blau Auditorium at the Ross School of Business, Tappan and Monroe Streets

Not surprisingly, Engestrom railed against the “gold standard” of randomized controlled trials as the best and only way to properly conduct research. He mixed in a couple jabs at the U.S. – one for emphasizing such studies and one for making unpopular interventions. I’m with him on both. Randomized controlled trials (RCT) shouldn’t be the gold standard for all kinds of research, and the U.S. shouldn’t have intervened in Iraq. At least not the way we did. But, I digress. I was talking about method.

In contrast to the positivist RCT program, Engestrom recommends a different process entirely. His process, we’ll call it formative interventions (that was on his slides), engages the research site as a participant in the project rather than as a passive recipient of a designed intervention. It differs from ICT (and even from Design Research – an approach gaining popularity in education research) in three main ways:

1. starting point,
2. process, and
3. outcome.

The starting point for formative interventions are poorly understood objects. RCT and design research start with some goal in mind. Having a goal presupposes that the goal is desirable. I dislike the arrogance behind starting a project from, “I know how it should be,” and so it’s no surprise that I like formative interventions’ starting point.

Engestrom calls formative interventions’ process “double stimulation.” That term doesn’t really work for me. I think what he means is that the research introduces and recognizes changes in the research environment over time. Whether those changes are planned by the researchers or not is not terribly important. The process of studying a changing phenomenon differs dramatically from the “execute, refine, repeat” approach RCT takes.

Lastly, the outcomes of the two methodological approaches differs. For Engestrom, the outcome should be “new activity concepts” and for RCT, it’s “solutions.” I’m often frustrated by “solution” terminology – because I’m uncomfortable labeling social phenomena as broken, because I’ve seen too many “solutions” that don’t have clear “problems”, because I just don’t see the world that black and white.

So now we have an outline of Engestrom’s preferred methodological approach. I like it. It’s engaged, rigorous, and embraces the ongoing and changing nature of social situations. Trouble is, it’s hard to sell, in the U.S. especially, and even harder to do.

Enter Ilya Zitter. Ilya is a PhD student at Utrecht University, and she uses a method she calls “Educational Design Research” in her doctoral work. Basically, she uses research, design, and practice approaches to study undergrads in a projects course. Hooray for higher education at ICLS! It’s almost as satisfying for me to engage as adults’ informal and workplace learning. Anyway, Ilya gave a short talk in a firehose session where she described how she conducted her research. This is exactly the kind of talk I like to attend at conferences. I can read papers, but papers about how the research was conducted are hard to come by. Sure, papers include methods sections, but those don’t often tell you the nitty gritty details. Ilya talked about her struggle to balance research, design, and practice in her work. This is a struggle I get to avoid in my dissertation but which is central to my life at Microsoft Research.

At MSR, we’re engaged in a formative intervention study of sorts. We’re working with HR and managers to adjust social and technological tools used in onboarding at Microsoft. I’m often uncomfortable in the “design” and “intervene” portions of such studies. I much prefer to be a fly on the wall. That’s not immediately useful (or publishable) though. I, like Ilya, am struggling to find balance and to negotiate relationships among researchers and practitioners all while gathering and analyzing data. It’s hard, but at least I’m not alone.

I use “stovepipes” to refer to the isolated, vertical towers of thought and work into which we’ve organized ourselves. I think I picked it up while serving on SI’s dean search committee where we spent a lot of time talking about how we wanted to avoid stovepipes in SI. We’re an interdisciplinary school, and we wanted to recommend a dean who would encourage intellectual respect and collaboration among the disciplines rather than stovepiping them. Ok, so, now I’m concerned about the stovepiping that happens between academia and the business world. This is not a new concern for me, but it’s one I haven’t written down for public consumption yet. It worries me that a summit like Gartner’s can take place and that academia neither talks about it nor attends. I don’t mean to imply that Gartner’s summit is the be-all, end-all and that it’s going to change the world forever, but it could be something interesting.  It concerns me that when I wanted to study newcomers in an organization, I was thwarted by lack of connections to organizations. Instead, I ended up studying newcomers to an academic environment and then interviewing (a year later) for a serendipitous opportunity to study newcomers in a public company. Man, I hope I get that internship. I digress.

The divide between academic research and business research seems to be growing. Is it growing? Am I just more attuned to it now than I have been? What can I do to get more connected to businesses so that I can learn from them, and so that my work can have some real world impact? I don’t want to be a messiah with academic knowledge; I want to get my hands dirty outside the lab. What would the cost to my academic reputation be if I were to focus on collaborations with industry researchers and managers? Where is the tunnel between the stovepipes?

Stovepipes aside, Gartner’s summit has one of the most male-dominated presenter lists I’ve seen in a quite a while. I hope overall that their company is more diverse. That said, I’m curious about the summit. I do wonder what collaboration technologies are on the horizon. I’ll be paying attention, for sure.

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Professional students, whether undergraduates or masters’ students, represent a significant portion of the iSchool community. How do iSchools effectively educate those students while continuing to develop successful research programs? This roundtable discussion will focus on how iSchools educate their professional students and engage them in the research aspect of their programs. Innovative approaches to training and integration will be the central theme of this discussion. In an iSchool – where students training for professions including librarianship, information policy, human-centered computing, preservation and researchers exploring such topics as incentive-centered design, forensic informatics, computational linguistics, and digital libraries have both competing and complimentary goals – the potentials for collaboration, innovation, misunderstanding, and disharmony are all high.

The annual iConference provides a unique opportunity for us, as a community, to discuss the roles our professional students have in shaping our identity and our practices. The proposed roundtable will invite participants to discuss questions such as:

* What should the role of research in training information professionals be?
* How can we best engage professional students in our research?
* How do iSchools address the unique curricular challenges we face in preparing students for a very wide variety of careers?
* What do we want an Information degree to signal in the marketplace?
* What are some successes in which research and professional training have benefited one another?

Participants will share innovative approaches to professional education, best practices in engaging professional students in research programs, and remaining challenges. We intend roundtable participation to represent the diversity of iSchools’ current programs. Confirmed participants include:

* Dr. Eileen G. Abels, Master’s Program Director, Associate Professor, College of Information Science & Technology, Drexel University
* Dr. Judith S. Olson, Richard W. Pew Collegiate Professor of Human Computer Interaction and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, School of Information, University of Michigan

Each speaker will present introductory remarks highlighting some of the achievements and challenges they face in their home programs, after which discussion will include questions and input from the attendees. This will be an interactive forum proposing ideas for new approaches to education and integration of professional students. We encourage participants to discuss ideas that work (and those that don’t!) in their schools. We will create and publicize a wiki space for pre- and post-conference participation as well.

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We’re hoping that Beth Mynatt from Georgia Tech will also join us and talk a bit about their successes. We’d love to have anyone interested in professional students and information research to join our discussion both online and in Los Angeles. The preliminary schedule of the conference indicates that our roundtable will take place sometime on Friday, February 29.